Colombiana (**½)

Directed by: Olivier Megaton

Starring: Zoe Saldanha, Michael Vartan, Cliff Curtis, Lennie James, Callum Blue, Jordi Mollà, Jesse Borrego, Amandla Stenberg

Seen: September 16^th 2011

**½ Out of ****

Colombiana tells of a 9-year old girl’s 15 year long quest for vengeance and little else. The scene is quickly set when Fabio (Borrego) fails to impress a local crime lord enough, and this villain sets his hounds on him, led by the relatively intimidating Marco (Mollà). The young Cataleya’s (Stenberg) parents are killed in the ensuing mayhem, and Marco’s negotiations with Cataleya turns sour before he gets what he wants. Cataleya flees and outsmarts an entire mob en route to the American Embassy in Colombia. Here she presents them with the information Marco was after in exchange for an American Passport. On arrival in America, she ditches her child support worker and manages to reach her uncle in Chicago, Emilio (Curtis), who she coerces into training her as a killer.

15 years later Cataleya (Saldanha) is still after Marco and his boss, as apparently the information given to the US government all those years ago in exchange for her US citizenship did not condemn them, but rather had them entered into witness relocation in the US under the management of CIA agent Richard (Blue). Cataleya kills a lot of criminals with possible ties to her target and marks their bodies as a warning or an omen of their coming doom in the hope that her excessive killing would be published in the news, and thus flush Marco out. The FBI agent investigating the murders, Ross (James), happens across Cataleya’s path when a friend of her boyfriend, Danny (Vartan), unwittingly exposes her identity. Cataleya is singularly focussed though, and will go to any length to exact her long awaited vengeance. The final confrontation is very much a flash in the pan affair, and is concluded on an excessively ridiculous note, one fleetingly hinted at earlier in the movie.

While most of the action in Colombiana is entertaining and pulse-pounding, there seems to always be a sense of depending on massive coincidence and assumption in advancing the plot. Whenever the plot requires ineptitude from a certain group of villains/good guys/anyone, it is provided in heaps, and it makes the other parties look very good in comparison. Cataleya is, of course, a master assassin, and everyone looks bad compared to her, with only Marco coming remotely close to posing a threat. With approximately 40 minutes spent on young Cataleya’s part of the story, Saldanha is not given enough time nearing the end to become more than a 24 year old killing machine with no fear and a pretty face. Jordi Mollà is little more than a greasy looking menace in Cataleya’s path and Cliff Curtis as Cataleya’s handler/uncle soon disappears from the story, another plot point on Cataleya’s path of vengeance.

If Colombiana had a stronger opening than this one, with just a bit more story to better justify events before just jumping into the violence, it might have been more engaging. And one thing it definitely needed was a better ending, as this is just weak, relying on staggering coincidence to feebly tie the last end. The makers of Taken has made a movie far inferior to Taken, and Colombiana, while still somewhat entertaining, is actually not all that good.