Just about 90% of the runtime of Colombiana is spent watching lingering shots of star Zoe Saldana’s
scantily clad body. As a matter of
fact, I’m going to go ahead and make the assumption that the only reason this
film even exists is an excuse to shoot Saldana in various states of undress and
then market the titillation to the masses. And that’s fine with me, that’s a
perfectly acceptable reason to make a movie. It’s just no guarantee that the
movie is going to be any good. Zoe Saldana beauty exploitation is enough to get
me in the door, but you’re going to have to give me something else to keep me
engaged to the end. Colombiana has
nothing of the sort. Most of the time it doesn’t even seem like it’s trying.
The story begins with a young Colombian girl named Cataleya (Amandla
Stenberg), whose father works in the drug trade, watching her parents get
gunned down by the cartel leader’s goons. Before he dies, her father gives her
a mysterious microchip of no real consequence that affords her some clout with
the US government. She uses it to travel to the States, where she meets her
uncle and has him teach her to be an assassin. It sounds a little far fetched
when you just write it down in a plot synopsis like that, but don’t worry, when
you see it all play out on the screen it’s even more ridiculous. After our
intro we get a time jump where suddenly our little Cataleya is all grows up (and
now played by Zoe Saldana) and conning her way into a police station where she
intends on assassinating a prisoner. It’s hard to say which actress plays the
character better, they both appear talented, but I imagine that some day
several years from now Stenberg and Saldana will be getting together and
sharing a cry over the traumatic experience of trying to lend weight to this awful
material.
The biggest problem with the movie is that it seems like
nobody was paying attention to any of the details. The script looks like a
rushed first draft, there are glaring continuity problems in the editing, from
moment to moment the characters’ motivations don’t make any sense, and it can
never decide if it’s an over the top explosion movie or a hard hitting drama
about a traumatized girl. The shoddy storytelling is to the point that one
second a bad guy is yelling that he needs Cataleya taken alive, and ten seconds
later he’s unloading a clip of bullets at her. There’s a scene where from one
angle Cataleya has puked a huge puddle of puke on a bureaucrat’s desk, and then
when they change to a different camera it’s no longer there. When Cataleya
pulls off the aforementioned prison assassination, she does it by posing as a
drunk girl who gets in a fender bender. Once in her cell, she escapes, travels
through the prison’s gigantic ventilation system, slips into the other prisoner’s
cell, kills him, slips back through the preposterously huge ventilation system,
and then gets back in her cell before detection. She even knocks out a guard
and plants the murder weapon on him to frame him. When the other police find
the prisoner dead, one second they’re locking up the framed guard and the next
they’re inexplicably running to the roof where they miss seeing Cataleya
slipping back into the vents by just a second. And then they run to make sure
the unconscious drunk girl is still in her cell, getting there mere seconds
after Cataleya is able to slip back in and pretend to be asleep. They do this even
though they would have literally no reason to suspect the drunk sleeping girl
had anything to do with the murder. And yet they go immediately to her cell,
which is one of many in a large, urban precinct, after they’d just restrained a
guard and blamed him for the murder seconds earlier. I’ve heard of plot holes
before, but this whole sequence made my brain puke inside my skull. I hope I was
adequately able to explain the sequence and why it didn’t work, but it was so
complicated in how little sense it made it still makes my head spin.
Seeing as this is just a stupid action movie that wants to
blow things up and show off a hot chick in her underwear, shouldn’t I forget
the plot holes and enjoy the over the top exploitation? Believe me, I would
love to, but this movie is so aggressively stupid it just doesn’t let you.
There’s one scene where the young Cataleya’s uncle teaches her a lesson by
unloading a clip of bullets into a random car and killing the driver, in broad
daylight, outside of a school, in an upscale Chicago neighborhood, in front of
dozens of visually horrified people. He then proceeds to stand there and give
her a lengthy speech while police sirens blare in the background before they
casually walk away down the sidewalk. It often feels like writer/producer Luc
Besson and director Olivier Megaton are just daring you to write the whole thing
off.
And once again, most of the problems come down to the
laziness of the script. The dialogue is just atrociously bad. It’s all generic,
hackneyed stuff that could have been excised from other action movies and
pieced together the way a kidnapper makes a ransom note with newspaper
clippings. Whenever the script needs someone to be somewhere for some reason,
they just use a magic computer interface to give them whatever information they
want. Because all computers are linked to everything, and any information can
be gotten by typing a few keystrokes into programs that look like no computer
program I’ve ever seen in real life. What is this, the early 90s? People are
too savvy these days for you to get away with this stuff. And the screenwriters
don’t even have the decency to wink about it. Instead, everything is treated
deadly serious. Including a climactic hand-to-hand fight involving bath towels
and toothbrushes that is the most dancy, fake looking, choreographed non-action
I’ve seen in my life. It might have been silly fun if we weren’t immediately queued
up to treat it as harrowing and dramatic by the slow motion frame rate and
cheesy music a few seconds later. I’m not even going to get into the death
scene involving a shark tank.
Really, Colombiana is
a failure on every level. It’s a revenge film that gives us an unlikable
protagonist. We’re supposed to marvel at Cataleya’s competence through most of
the film, but it’s her own stupid behavior that gets her in big trouble by the
end. She’s smart when the script wants to show off, then dumb when it needs to
create some peril. There’s no consistency. And by the time she threatens to
murder a man’s entire family to get her own way, I had stopped wanting to see
her give that evil drug dealer his comeuppance anyway. It’s an action film that
is full of lame action. I’m just going to say it: Parkour is played out. From
now on, every time I see someone scrambling across a rooftop I’m just going to
put my face in my hands in disgust. Especially when an eight-year-old girl is
pulling off amazing stunts and it’s not played for laughs or camp. And the
action editing here is terrible. The angles are all over the place and there’s
no spatial continuity to be had. Try and follow what’s happening during
Cataleya’s chase from her parent’s bullet riddled home; I dare you. Lastly,
this is a skin flick without enough skin. Yeah, most of this movie is about
filming Saldana slinking around in her underwear, but they don’t even manage to
get any nudity out of her. Exploitation movies of decades past at least had the
gumption to deliver on their seediness. Colombiana
sells tickets on exploiting the female form and then can’t even deliver the
goods. You could see this much of Saldana by looking at a photo shoot in a
mainstream glamour magazine. Give me boobs or give me a movie worth watching! Colombiana would only be worth watching if it were 1992, I was still an
eleven-year-old boy, and I caught it on late night cable.
