- Title: Colombiana
- IMDb: link
2011’s Colombiana is your typical B-movie revenge flick that is elevated by the casting of Zoe Saldana as Cataleya, an orphan from Bogotá whose live was laid out when her parents were murdered by a cartel in front of her at the age of nine. Managing to make it the United States, her drive for revenge is molded by an uncle (Cliff Curtis) in Chicago allowing her to become a top-tier assassin and lay the groundwork for her eventual revenge.
The first thing you notice about Colombiana is that it takes nearly a quarter of the film to give us Saldana. Everything up until that point involves the character’s backstory with Cataleya played well by Amandla Stenberg who shows both some dramatic chops and athletic skill in running from the multiple killers. Jumping forward, we get a sequence showing off the skills the character has learned over the years by killing a prisoner in a police station through the use of misdirection, guile, and deadly precession.
There are several elements at play with Cataleya’s revenge plans against both the trigger man (Jordi Mollà) and the crime boss (Beto Benites) who had her family killed, her complicated relationship with her uncle and his family who raised her, her largely physical relationship with an artist (Michael Vartan) in Chicago, and the FBI agent (Lennie James) who has been tracking the killings she has made over the years and the clues left in hopes of leading her to the Don Luis (Benites) and her revenge.
In a nutshell, Colombiana is a fun flick where Saldana gets to kick some serious ass and look great doing it. The film is notable for several sequences including Cataleya’s hits both in the prison and inside a mansion where she literally feeds a gangster to the fishes, her escape from the FBI once they learn her identity, and her relentless attack on Don Luis’ compound in the film’s climax. Some aspects of the script by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen are tighter than others (the FBI thread isn’t one of its strengths), but the film knows what kind of story it is and director Olivier Megaton has fun telling its story.
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