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@Dazzler
Not in Hollywood.
Before I begin this review in earnest, I’d like to point out something deeply troubling. Namely, that Zoe Saldana is incredibly, freakishly skinny… and everyone seems to assume that it’s a good thing. Her skeletal frame looks as if a stiff breeze will knock it over. The pits in her eyes and writhing tendons along her stick-thin arms speak to a woman in desperate need of help. It serves as a shocking distraction in the midst of Columbiana, a film that overtly sexualizes her body even as it falls apart before our eyes. This is business as usual in Hollywood – starving women to the point of emaciation and then presenting them to us as some kind of idealized beauty instead of the monstrous dehumanization that it is. It needs to stop. Now.
The star’s dangerously low weight is only the start of its problems. Co-written by French auteur Luc Besson, it overtly recycles many of his greatest hits (notably La Femme Nikita and The Professional) to demonstrably diminished effect. Director Olivier Megaton has a slick style and knows how to shoot an action sequence, but the script can’t lift that material beyond the totally superficial. It involves another assassination game, another woman on the run and another round of elaborate set pieces designed to turn bad guys into charcoal briquettes. In order to swallow it, you need to stretch those belief suspenders until they snap.
Saldana’s heroine Cataleya begins life as the beloved daughter of a Columbian ne’er-do-well. When he’s killed by a business associate, she makes her way to Chicago, where her gangster uncle (Cliff Curtis) schools her in the deadly arts. She becomes a killer for hire, but when she’s not icing snitches or feeding fraudulent con artists to sharks, she hunts down the gang that killed her family: working her way up to the swarthy cartel leader (Beto Benites) who ordered the hit on her father. Naturally, the FBI is in pursuit of her as well, forcing her to live on the fringes of society apart from human contact. (She has a boyfriend, but their relationship basically amounts to semi-regular booty calls and no pesky facts.)
Megaton never diverts from the formula, concentrating instead on the various locked-box puzzles Cataleya must solve in order to reach her quarry. One miscreant is being held in a Bakersfield police station, another guarded by an army of thugs in his private villa and so on. Columbiana takes great joy in revealing her various tricks and techniques for getting past all the obstacles… aided by a little Hollywood hand-waving, since she seems to possess supernatural abilities to avoid notice. (And seriously people, we need to get rid of the whole “sneaking around in the air ducts” thing, ‘cause it’s been done.)
The big problem, unfortunately, is that too much time takes place between those scenes, throwing off the film’s pacing and making us wade through a lot of clichés to reach the good stuff. Columbiana is also very slow to get going: after a whiz-bang opening, it takes an interminable amount of time charting Cataleya’s journey to America and her interaction with her uncle. By the time we hop back into killing folks, we’ve lost the B-movie thrill of it, and it takes far too long to catch it again. Though well-made and enjoyable, the action sequences lack the originality to justify the dead weight surrounding them.
And that down time forces us again to contemplate Saldana’s body on copious display. The actress seems comfortable with the material, but she lacks the intensity and emotional depth of earlier Besson heroines and can’t pull off the desperate bad ass routine required for the storyline to work. Without that, Columbiana is little more than a music video, punctuated by some poetic justice and stuff that goes boom. Besson has done far better, and while Megaton has a future in this genre, one hopes he can lift his game above the ultimately shopworn material here. It’s not enough for a night of basic entertainment… and it’s certainly not worth starving the lead actress to death for.
I'm pretty sure it's Colombiana as in a native female from Colombia
Doubt that I'll see this in theaters, Irene is throwing a monkey wrench in my weekend. I'll wait for home video
Thanks for pointing that out Wise. As I am half ColOmbian, that common mistake really irks me. Let's get the title of the movie right.
I gotta agree with Zoe's weight though. If she put on an extra 15 -20 pounds she would look much better. I'm not sure why some actresses try to be so thin they look emaciated? They need to learn that thin and healthy looking is way more appealing than looking sickly.
I'm a sucker for revenge films so I might check this out in theaters.
Good point about the storm Wise, i'm sure that's going to kill BO numbers this weekend.
A quick shout out to my fellow mania people on the east cost. The rest of us will praying this hurricane is not an epic one. I don't think you can avoid the flooding from the looks of it but hopefully none of the buildings will get washed away and no deaths. I keep hoping this thing goes out to sea but looks like it is going to do what they are projecting path wise.
Im glad Im not the only one that thinks Ms Saldana needs to eat a hamburger or two. Im tired of seeing womens skeletons through thier skin. Ive been comenting on this womans size since Star Trek came out.
Luc Besson . . nuf said . . Seriously the dude has a SICK fetish with SKINNY women, and I would not put it past him that he made her contractorally obligated to be his vision of a hot woman, just LOOK at the chicks in his films . . all of them skinny anorexic Super models on the verge of starvation. THE ONLY one of his films I actually enjoyed was WASSABI, and even there he finds the skinniest japanese girl he could find. . uhhgg, not that I see HE is involved, no FRAKIN Way am I going to see this film . .
Sounds like a standard over the top chick action movie. End of Summer is near. Seeing as how our country has weight problems on the plus size, an under weight chick is probably pretty hard to get to these days.