Colombiana, co-written by the skilled and always interesting Luc Besson, plays nicely and at a steady clip, like an earnest if overdone sequel to Besson’s excellent The Professional. Zoe Saldana’s assassin character might have been little Natalie Portman’s orphan girl all grown up and gone wrong, really wrong, only you tend to forget that fact because she is taking out the trash after watching her parents get gunned down by drug thugs in Bogota, Colombia. From what I’ve heard, Colombiana (directed by Olivier Megaton) is apparently getting praise and attention and, having seen it, I can see why and I recommend it. If you see it, take it for what it is, with a preposterous plot. Just don’t expect The Professional‘s exquisite bittersweetness. Cataleya (Saldana, the female alien romantic interest in Avatar, and please don’t hold that atrocity against her) is soulless, and Megaton’s direction is both too clipped and too generic to make us care deeply for her, though with family and her boyfriend (Michael Vartan) in the picture, we want to and her quest to hunt down her parents’ murderers and their accessories is irresistible. Why we’re drawn to these women ice killers, from La Femme Nikita in all its incarnations to whatever girls with guns product came out last week, probably has its roots in empowerment for what Simone de Beauvoir called the second sex and in this sense lithe Saldana’s Cataleya delivers. Colombiana would have been much more interesting, however, had it ventured, like the Jason Bourne character, more deeply into her alliance with a federal policeman, the most interesting and dimensional character, played by Lennie James. The action gets less predictable and more involving when his cop, trying to solve Cataleya’s calling card murder spree, goes up against a louse with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), representing the incompetence and corruption of the U.S. government, complete with photos of Bush and Obama. The story lacks pathos and needs more layers, and the contrast in cops comes too late and goes too soon to score a bullseye. As it is, with over-the-top vengeance, Colombiana hits its target. Look for signs, i.e., Watch Your Step, in the final frames to cap things off with a few messages to think about.
