COLOMBIANA

title: COLOMBIANA
year: 2011
cast: Zoe Saldana
rating: ***

Don’t judge this movie by a farfetched scene that, once the plot of a revenge-driven femme fatale seeking the killers of her family is well in place, our antiheroine winds up at the mansion of a fat womanizing embezzler where, in the swimming pool beneath a plastic cover, sharks are trained not to attack unless blood hits the water. Our heroine Cataleya, played with lithely lethal prowess by Zoe Saldana, swims above the circling fanged fish without a care in the world: and this could be where the movie jumps the… you know what. But the rest isn’t so awful. Beginning with Cataleya as a naïve wide-eyed little girl witnessing her family’s brutal slaying in Columbia by a drug lord, she escapes... Then cons the authorities into America where she lives with her uncle, a professional killer who does what we don’t see… teaches her to be an assassin. By the time Saldana takes the role as a twenty-something she’s got the skills of 007 and Tarantino’s Bride in KILL BILL, which this movie borrows from in the Spaghetti Western combined with Martial Arts melodrama. One scene as Cataleya fakes a drunk driving accident, outsmarts prison guards and takes out her target in a guarded cell merits fine direction and swift editing. Stretch disbelief to the limit as a spindle-armed woman takes on so many bad guys all at once and you’ll do fine, because while it’s not a great movie, COLUMBIANA succeeds at being pretty good.