Colombiana

The Ghost in the Machine Gun

I have always found it fascinating when a movie is visibly haunted by the ghost of another film. *Colombiana* (2011) is exactly that sort of phantom. For years, producer Luc Besson and director Olivier Megaton kicked around a script called *Mathilda*, a planned sequel to the 1994 hit *Léon: The Professional*. When studio rights and Natalie Portman's evolving career made that impossible, they basically crossed out Mathilda's name, wrote in "Cataleya," and moved the inciting childhood tragedy to Bogota. The result is a revenge thriller that feels deeply familiar, for better and worse. You can practically see the seams where the old story was hastily tailored to fit a new protagonist.



Still, if the script is hand-me-down Besson, Zoe Saldaña's performance is entirely her own. Coming off the massive, CGI-heavy spectacles of *Avatar* and *Star Trek*, Saldaña anchors this film with a startling, sinewy physicality. She reportedly studied wildlife documentaries to figure out how Cataleya should move, and it shows. Watch her when she is stalking a target through a ventilation shaft or silently dropping from a jail cell ceiling. There is an animalistic economy to her movements — no wasted gestures, just a terrifyingly patient coil of tension. She does not just hold a weapon; she looks like an extension of it. *The Hollywood Reporter*'s Jordan Mintzer wasn't wrong when he noted she gives an "acrobatic performance that makes the overcooked material watchable". I would go a step further and say she drags the material kicking and screaming into something resembling art.



Whether that is enough to save the movie really depends on your tolerance for Euro-thriller absurdity. Megaton directs action with a sort of caffeinated frenzy that sometimes works and often exhausts. There is one scene, though, that completely breaks the movie's reality in a way I couldn't help but admire. Young Cataleya, having just arrived in Chicago, tells her gangster uncle Emilio (Cliff Curtis) that she wants to be a killer. To teach her a lesson about needing a formal education first, Emilio casually pulls out a handgun and empties it into a random car on a crowded daytime street. No cops come. Nobody really reacts. It is a hysterically unhinged moment that belongs in a Looney Tunes short, yet it is played with deadpan sincerity. I am not entirely sure Megaton knows how funny it is.



In the end, *Colombiana* is a B-movie dressed up in studio gloss. *The Guardian*'s Peter Bradshaw hit the nail on the head, calling it a "fantastically ridiculous, toweringly humourless action-thriller". He meant it as a dig, but honestly, that ridiculousness is the film's only real shield against being completely forgotten. It takes itself so seriously that you almost have to respect the hustle. We have seen this exact vengeance narrative play out a hundred times before. Still, there is a specific, strange gravity in watching Saldaña treat this pulp with the utter conviction of a Shakespearean tragedy. It does not make the movie great. It just makes it hard to look away.