Colombiana

Just so you know, the Mindless Movie Marathon is now on Twitter. You can follow it here, and I'll try to set up a widget so our latest posts appear on this very blog. Both Evan and I have access to post on it (see if you can tell our tweets apart), and we'll tweet when new columns come out, which movies we're going to see (and which ones we're definitely skipping), as well as whatever movie humour pops into our heads.

Anyway, this week we went to see Colombiana. We got there a bit late (cleverly skipping the ads while still getting great seats) and I got both the trailers. We came in during Ghost Rider, and Straw Dogs was next. A sequel and a remake. Although at least Straw Dogs has good source material. The original starred Dustin Hoffman.

Anyway, Colombiana opens with four company title screens (we keep track), and then quick shots over Columbian favelas as the credits play. The first actual scene has a mansion and plays Ave Maria, so I had high hopes that this movie would be good.

Two men are getting sentimental about what they mean to each other, so they bring out the alcohol to restore the level of testosterone. After they each have a glass, one of them leaves. It's pretty clear that they want to kill each other, and they both know the other wants to kill them. The one who leaves goes to his house to evacuate his family (his wife and nine-year-old daughter). He gives his daughter an SD card (in 1992?), a card for the American Embassy, an address in Chicago, and a golden necklace of an orchid native to Columbia called a Cataleya (hey, it's also the daughter's name! What a coincidence!) that's their family symbol, or something like that.

Before the family can leave, the bad guys show up, and the parents fight them in a hallway (and offscreen, to boot). The head bad guy tries to talk nicely to the daughter to get her to hand over the SD card, but she stabs him in the hand and leaps out the window. Parkour ensues.

Over and under the favelas they go, before she eventually slides into a sewer whose entrance is too small for the rest of them to follow. She emerges from a manhole and goes to the embassy, where she's shown inside after producing the card her father gave her. There, she vomits up the SD card (she swallowed it. Smart girl) and hands it over.

The Americans are kind enough to give her some money, a passport, and fly her to Miami under the watch of a caregiver, but she escapes from a bathroom and makes her way to Chicago. There, she meets up with her uncle (who seems to be a bit of a gangster) and asks to be trained as a killer. Yes, she's nine, and apparently cold-hearted enough to hold onto revenge. And by the way, what is it with children devoting their lives to killing their parents' murderers? This is two weeks in a row.

Anyway, we cut to 15 years later, where a drunk Zoe Saldana crashes into a cop car. I'm talking about in the movie, not the headlines. Although I wouldn't be surprised, given most celebrity behaviour. Anyway, at the police station, she's taken to a cell to sleep it off. Once the guard leaves, she takes off her dress and rolls her skin-tight black cat-suit down her legs and arms. Then, sneaking past cameras, crawling through air ducts (and under short-circuited fans - it's a good thing she's anorexically thin), and knocking out unsuspecting police officers, she manages to kill another prisoner who's there under the not-so-watchful eye of the US Marshals. The gunshots attract the attention of everyone in the station, so it's back to the air vents, onto the roof, fingertip hanging onto ledges, and then back into her cell and her dress and pretending to sleep before anyone thinks to check on her.

The next morning she's released just before the station is locked down. We meet the FBI agents looking into the murder (there's been 21 others with the same M.O.) but having no success. Meanwhile, Cataleya goes back to Chicago to get another assignment from her uncle, to hang out in her apartment, and to move the tacked-on love story forward.

Her next assignment is much like the first. Stealth, avoid detection, only fight when necessary. Maybe it was the fact that I just got finished playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution (great game!) but I found a lot of similarities. Avoid cameras. Duck under windows. Make as little sound as possible. Knock people out when they're not facing you. Crawl through improbably spacious air ducts to get around. Basically, alert as few people as possible to your presence. Evan assured me that the Splinter Cell games were similar. Colombiana is pretty much a video game, except much shorter and worse.

Anyway, the FBI finally puts the clues into the paper, alerting the bad guys from the beginning of the movie that someone's after them, and putting them on Cat's trail at the same time. Of course, Cat wants to draw them out, and so the rest of the movie deals with this as well avoiding the FBI (which is closing in).

The movie has problems. Some small ones, some large ones. There's more stealth and far less action that I would have preferred. There's a good fight at the end, finished with the deft disassembly of a gun. Other than that, a lot of it is left up to the imagination, or the action is implied using quick cuts, shaky cameras, and intense music. And there's a lot of Cataleya escaping a room just before someone else enters it. Narrow escapes are fine, but not 17 of them in a row. Just keep it plausible, please.

Speaking of music, it's wasn't great. Sure, they started with Ave Maria and finished with an excellent cover of Hurt by Johnny Cash, but in between was a lot of music more suited to a drama (like Field of Dreams or October Sky).

I can understand some of the ideas they're trying to get across, but I don't think they did a very good job. For instance, they tried to show Cat as a very strong woman, but then they had her gradually breaking down as her support is removed. And I had to wonder who she would be if she had her revenge. She would have no more purpose in life, so what would she do?

It's a DVD movie. Probably a bit worse than The Mechanic (that one had slightly more action) and better than Faster (that one was quite a let down). So if you want to watch Zoe Saldana slink around in a skin-tight suit (or another short scene in which she clearly has no bra), you should probably wait. And if you're not interested in that, you should probably just skip it entirely.