Columbiana – Movie Review

Columbiana – Movie Review

Luc Besson is responsible for two of the greatest assassin films of all time. In Leon: The Professional and La Femme Nikita the French writer/director presented not just remarkable fight scenes and high tension, but rich characters living isolated lives
and resisting close relationships. With such amazing credits to his name it’s hard to understand what exactly was going through his mind while he and Robert Mark Kamen were writing Colombiana.

The film opens in Colombia where a young girl named Cataleya Restrepo (Zoe Saldana) Cataleya, who, as a nine-year-old witnesses her parents murder at the hands of mobsters commanded by a man named Don Luis (Beto Benites). However, she’s handy with a hunting
knife too, putting her mark on Marco before going on a rooftop ‘parkour’ run for her life, dodging bullets, a motorbike, a ‘parkouring’ pursuer and various SUVs. It’s all breathtaking stuff that makes you read the end crawl really carefully to see if any little
girls were harmed in the making of this movie.

Managing to survive on her own, she travels to Chicago to live with her hard-edged uncle Emilio (Cliff Curtis), who is also some kind of gangster. We know this because we’re introduced to him beating some guy to pulp. Cataleya decides she wants to be a professional
killer and waste everyone who had anything to do with the deaths of her parents. That’ll be all of Colombia, then!  

However, first she has to go to school and, after bribing the principal to overlook Cataleya’s late start and presumed missing grades, uncle Emilio convinces her education is the best way and she later has him train her as a killer. However, we don’t get
to see that part and suddenly after fifteen years she has become an elite assassin with plans for revenge against those that took her family away, but with a smart FBI agent (Lennie James) on her tail, she needs to execute before it’s too late. 

Then there’s the story’s motivator: Cataleya’s mission for revenge. Again, this is where any semblance of character development would have been great, but a complete lack of exposition also hurts the film. After the protagonist has grown up and become a
cleaner it’s shown that she tags all her victims to get Don Luis’s attention, but it’s never explained how the men she murdered are connected to the Colombian kingpin. 

The action and fight sequences, shot competently by director Olivier Megaton, prevent the film from completely flat lining. While the movie doesn’t have many insane, explosive scenes that make it feel as though the characters have jet fuel pumping through
their veins, the filmmaker succeeds in doing a lot with a little and always provides the audience with spatial awareness and context. The bigger action beats are largely relegated to the final act of the film, but Megaton also does a solid job of building
tension while Cataleya executes two hits in the middle of the film, one in a prison and another in a Mexican estate. 

Action aside, what ultimately kills the film is a complete lack of originality or initiative. The plot and characters are paint-by-numbers and even those elements are put together sloppily. The entire premise hangs on the idea that an assassin with a need
revenge for revenge is more than enough for audiences, but that’s simply not true. A movie needs depth, it needs motive and it needs emotion. Colombiana has none of these things.

Posted by Momina Khan on Oct 29 2011. Filed under Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry