What I want to be when I grow up - a female assassin, by Zoe Saldana
The story goes something like this - cute, innocent nine-year old Cataleya's parents are killed for no reason other than that they are doubling dealing hit people who betrayed their drug lord boss. Inexplicably, the Drug Lord fails to appreciate that folks need to make a living and that killing people and selling out drug lords can be really profitable. The seemingly helpless waif stabs the head goon from the hit-squad and proceeds to outrun the rest of the crew on a chase through Bogota (which looks a lot like Mexico) doing roof jumping scenes that would make James Bond proud and sewer diving al la Harrison Ford in Fugitive.
She escapes to the American embassy where she proceeds to barf up what looks like an SD card (full of Drug Lord secrets) which somehow gets inserted into a floppy disk. This was supposed to be 1992, SD cards weren't invented yet but who cares right? She couldn't have swallowed a floppy disk. So, naturally after inventing the future and bringing down Colombia's biggest cartel she is whisked away to the US where she somehow magically manages to escape from the airport bathroom and find her way to Chicago. She ends up in Chicago because that's where her uncle lives (a real nice guy who works in the family trade) and yet no one ever thinks to look for her there.
Fast forward to 2011 or so where we witness the all-grown up and painfully skinny Cataleya infiltrate a jailhouse to kill some really creepy looking guy for apparently no reason. Of course, as an assassin, she's supposed to be smart and deadly - that's why she can do all these amazing things. Her uncle made a big point out of telling her (al la Mel Gibson in Braveheart) that warriors or killers think with their head - he does this while shooting up a stranger's car in broad daylight in front of the school where she's just enrolled with dozens of witnesses nearby.
Note the mysterious flower and the fact that Juan Valdez looks like every Drug Lord ever portrayed in the movies
So anyway, Cataleya, named after an exotic flower - they reminder of this about 57 times - sports her slinky body leotard for hits because as we know wearing a lot of clothes makes it harder to fit into air ducts, sewers and other tight spaces. Cataleya is a very artistic girl as she likes to paint a picture of the flower she is named after on all of her dozens of victims. This is supposedly to ensure that the drug lords who killed her parents come and find her so she can ensnare them in her elaborate trap. Of course it turns out she really doesn't have a trap and gets the rest of her family of killers killed. Did we say that this movie was muy estupidia - si...
Anyway, on the periphery this cinematic misfire there are lousy performances and oddities in all directions. We've got Callum Blue playing a CIA operative who can't seem to master his American accent, we've got that guy from Jericho playing an FBI agent with the same problem. We've got a Chicago police Sargent who can barely seem to speak English at all. We've got locations in Chicago that look oddly like Mexico. We've got a location in New Orleans that looks just like Miami. We've got Cataleya confessing to the FBI that she wanted to be one of the good guys despite the fact she spent her life with killers training in the family business. We've a got big fat guy wearing funny underwear getting eaten by sharks. We've got a movie that associates everything in Colombia with drugs and killers yet seems not to know anything about the place they're maligning.
The only positive thing we might say about this movie is that it isn't as stupid as Taken or Taken 2 - a film made by folks involved with producing Colombiana.
