Colombiana
2 1/2 stars (out of 4)
This week’s poster child for Hollywood humiliation is Zoe Saldana.
She’s co-star of history’s highest-grossing film (Avatar), and part of a successful franchise reboot (Star Trek). Yet that’s apparently not sufficient star power to prevent the embarrassment of her latest movie dodging critics and slinking into theatres as a Friday Dreadful.
Turns out Colombiana isn’t completely dreadful, if you ignore the holes in its Swiss cheese of a plot. As payback stories go, it’s pretty rote stuff, even with well-connected producer Luc Besson co-writing with Robert Mark Kamen, the pens behind Taken and The Transporter.
But visually, it’s often a treat, with both Saldana and newcomer Amandla Stenberg (who plays Saldana’s younger self in a 1992 prologue) kicking butt in the best tradition of femme-empowering Besson pics. The film is directed by France’s Olivier Megaton (Transporter 3), who was named for the atomic bomb. Yes, really.
The butt-kicker is Cataleya, named for the Colombian flower that becomes the film’s dominant motif — along with sexy underthings.
She’s a smart and resourceful young hellcat in Bogota, who at age 9 sees her parents killed by generic mobsters (Beto Benites and Jordi Molla) and their similarly swarthy stooges.
Cataleya barely escapes with her own life, and by various sly means winds up in Chicago, there to be tutored by her cruel-but-loving uncle Emilio (Cliff Curtis) in the art of being a professional assassin.
Her day job is working for Emilio, but in her spare time, she methodically plots to rub out the men who killed her ma ’n’ pa.
If you’re thinking about Besson’s early hits La Femme Nikita and The Professional, you’re on the right track. But the main touchstone for Colombiana would be last summer’s Angelina Jolie action vehicle Salt, in that the female protagonist uses her wits as much or more than a gun.
You’ve got to give imagination points to a movie that manages to make a climactic fight scene work using mainly towels and toothpicks.
Cataleya also has a unique way of busting into a jail to settle a score.
It’s preposterous on every level, but fun to watch — especially when Saldana dons a black cat suit, or scanty white undies, or whatever else she chooses to barely put on.
“I don’t care what’s professional,” Cataleya tells her scolding uncle. “I’m doing this my way.”
You go, girl, and we’ll overlook the wimpy boyfriend (Michael Vartan), the weirdly motivated government operative (Callum Blue) and the dogged FBI agent (Lennie James) who for once isn’t played by Tommy Lee Jones.
We don’t even get a proper explanation for the Colombiana title, but if attention to detail is what you’re looking for, this isn’t the movie.
Peter Howell is a syndicated movie critic for the Toronto Star.