Listen, I’m not made of stone. You put Zoe Saldana in a catsuit and have her slithering around air conditioning ducts while techno music pumps and, basically, you’ve most of my attention.
Colombiana, the newest shoot-first-and-devise-story-points-later picture from Luc Besson comes to you as advertised. It’s action-packed, entertaining, far-fetched, idiotic and just a little bit sleazy. I believe the French refer to a meal like this as Le Big Mac.
We open in Colombia when an evil drug kingpin (I’m guessing that's what he is, the film doesn’t get too specific) decides to wipe out one of his associates. The associate is later described as someone who does “wetwork,” so, you know, a murderer, but the movie frames him and his wife as angelic martyrs... ones that must be avenged by the crafty young girl who outsmarts the baddies and the CIA and disappears on the streets of Chicago.
Here she meets her uncle, who convinces her that if she wants to grow and become a good killer she must also stay in school. In a wonderfully preposterous scene, the uncle fires a gun on a car in the middle of broad daylight (maybe killing a guy?) to teach our young heroine a valuable life lesson. This is one of a few baffling moments in Colombiana that implies that maybe there’s some tongue-in-cheek statement about violence going on this in film. But it's kinda hard to tell.
She later grows into Zoe Saldana and thank God for that because by the twenty minute mark your mind will start to wander. Oh, it’ll continue wandering as Colombiana’s absurd plot plays out, but at least you’ll get to see Zoe in a wide array of titillating outfits.
There’s the scene where she kills a guy in a catsuit, then she kills a guy in shorts that are dripping wet from shark tank water and then there’s the part where she’s doing a completely unmotivated and out-of-character dance in front of a very phallic painting in jeans shorts. Best, though, is when she must flee a SWAT attack that’s surrounded her house – when she’s home in her comfy clothes! So, yes, Zoe sets off C4 charges, blasts machine guns and scurries down an elevator shaft in ultra-tight, light blue sweat-shorts. Vive le Cinema!
Why is she murdering all these people? To send a message. You see, she’s a contract killer (don’t worry, it is implied that her marks are all baddies, like the Bernie Madoff-type pig living with a harem of women and the aforementioned sharks) and she’s tagging her victims with a Latin American flower that is meant to get the baddie from the beginning out of hiding.
The implausibility of this is the least of our story worries. Remember in Se7en when you were asked to take the leap of faith that a) Kevin Spacey got his books out of the local library and b) the cops had access to those records to track him down? Colombiana asks you to accept quite a few of these screenplay cheats. My favorite is when the mail guy with a Colombian/horticultural wife just happens to be walking past the right desk at the FBI at exactly the right time....
Colombiana, to be blunt, is awful. But there’s something in me that can’t completely condemn it. Especially when the French do it and especially when the director’s name is Olivier Megaton (alas, it is a nom de guerre, but still). Maybe I’m just projecting, but there’s a raucous, inebriated, “slumming” aspect to this film that I can’t help but respect.
The real problem is this: Zoe Saldana deserves better. Between her turn here and in the (far superior) The Losers from last year, it is clear she can handle being the star of her own action picture. It would be nice to see her in one we didn’t have to like in quotes.
