Amandla Stenberg is Cataleya (named for a Colombian orchid) who, almost as soon as the film begins, is witness to her parents' death. Wide eyed and preternaturally still as it all goes down around her, we soon find that actually she's not quite so easily shaken as she seems and, after doing a pretty neat job of wounding her intended murderer Marco (smoulderingly played by Jordi Mollà), she wows us all by turning out to be an incredibly talented practitioner of parkour. Of course, it begs the question of why she didn't run to begin with, but that's beside the point. Suffice to say she gets away, turns in a bunch of... ummm... data to the CIA and gets herself to the US, where she moves in with her Chicagoan uncle Emilio. "I want to be a killer. Can you help?" she asks him during a Tender Moment scene (by this point, there have already been several of these - including the longest goodbye ever with her about-to-be-shot father). Powerless to resist the only wish of his poor, little, orphaned niece, he does what any self-respsecting criminal would do. Indulge her.
Fast forward fifteen years, and Cataleya has grown into Zoe Saldana... and quite the hit-woman. On top of the extra-curricular killing she's taken on herself, she's got a steady stream of work from her uncle. Emilio arranges the jobs; she executes. But she doesn't just execute. Oh no. She goes through contortions (literally) to pull off her murders in the most ridiculously Rube Goldberg-esque ways possible - tagging all with a scrawled picture of her signature orchid.
At first, you may be fooled. Perhaps all of this really is necessary to get past tight security, police and extra paranoid mobsters. But then, you realize, no. No, this is just silly. And then it hits you. The reason for all of this ridiculous chasing and hiding and overly complicated scheming is that the film really has nothing new to offer that a thousand other revenge films haven't already delivered. It's been done before. Granted, not with Ms Saldana in a cat suit, a shark tank, a pressure bomb trigger activated by a microwave, and random heavy artillary hidden along the way.
This epiphany comes about an hour in, and after that, "Colombiana" is just plain boring. You know what's going to ultimately happen. Cataleya's convoluted (and realistically unreliable) antics require far too much luck and planning to be spontaneous, and the fantasy becomes tiresome. Even her relationship with her boyfriend doesn't bring any humanity to the character: Cataleya fails to be fun in even a comic book charicature sort of way.
Relative newcomer Olivier Megaton ("Transporter 3") is responsible for the direction, but it's hard to say whether it's that or the script that lets the film down more. The actors try, but with so little to work with, they flounder. In a better movie, a hot assassin who can use a toothbrush as a weapon might be interesting. In "Colombiana", it's just drivel.
| Movie title | Colombiana |
|---|---|
| Release year | 2011 |
| MPAA Rating | PG-13 |
| Our rating | |
| Summary | In a better movie, the story of Zoe Saldana's hot assassin might be interesting. In "Colombiana", it's just drivel. |
