Zoe Saldana, star of Colombiana, is apparently already famous, but I in my ignorance had to google her. I discover she was Uhura in the new Star Trek and the real person under the CGIed blue princess in Avatar — no wonder I didn’t recognise her.
Now I will. She looks like a cross between Thandi Newton and Rosario Dawson, both of whom have done a bit of action here and there. Dawson is described on the Internet Movie Database as “stunningly exotic” to look at, so I suppose the same goes for Saldana, only more so.
Moreover, Saldana does action big time in Colombiana, which is the story of a woman whose parents are killed in a drug war in, yes, Colombia, when she’s a girl of about eight.
She grows up to become an assassin of almost supernatural skill, her aim in life being to wipe out all the people responsible for whacking her mom and dad. This is pretty much the same plot as Conan the Barbarian and Death Wish, not to mention countless other revenge thrillers, so any evaluation of the movie has to be on how it’s done rather than what is done.
Stylishly saturated
And it’s done well. It’s co-produced and co-written by French thriller-master Luc Besson and is directed by the piquantly named Olivier Megaton, whose most prominent previous credit is the third Transporter movie, in which Jason Statham does a lot of fast driving and fast fighting.
Not that Megaton, despite his name, brings any particular weight to Colombiana, but he does bring a fair amount of style.
The movie’s look is that super-saturated look designed to tell us we’re in a hot Third World country, though it persists even when we’re in the more temperate, even chilly, United States. The early sequences, at least, are indeed in Bogotá, and there we have the whacking of mom and dad, with young Cataleya, for that is her name, escaping manfully from the baddies by running through and over the top of this particular favela like an under-aged and female Jason Bourne.
“Cattleya” is the name of a flower, an orchid; this is something the FBI guys in the movie take a while to discover, and then they too are after her. Naturally they have very impressive state-of-the-art technology on their side, so that helps. Now our heroine is being chased by a whole lot of drug people from Bogotá as well as the American law-enforcement agencies, hence there’s a lot of chasing.
Between the artfully contrived action sequences there are what you might call the human-interest bits in which we meet Cataleya’s surrogate family, who are sentimental mafia types, and her artist boyfriend, who finds her mysterious movements and motivations utterly baffling. Poor guy — he’s a sensitive kinda modern man, and here, unbeknownst to him, he’s hooked up with a ruthless killer. But that’s what you get for being a girlyman, no?
Better to butch up, whether you’re male or female, and relish all this shooting and chasing and jumping. Or just go for a jog, or a hard workout, and await Colombiana on DVD.