Today's Review: Colombiana

I do like a good movie featuring a trained assassin. Whether or not Colombiana is a good movie featuring a trained assassin, that is up for debate.

Zoe Saldana plays Cataleya, the daughter of a man working for the drug lord Don Luis. After betraying the boss by taking vital information, Cataleya's parents are slain in front of her, but she manages to escape from the thugs and gain entry to the United States with the information her father has given her. Seeking refuge with her uncle Emilio (Cliff Curtis), there is only one thing on her mind, training to be a killer so she can seek revenge on Don Luis for her parents' death.

Of course, the focus of the movie is on Zoe Saldana, as you can probably guess from the poster featuring only her, but the girl who plays Cataleya as a child is worth a mention too. Both are pretty good in their roles, eluding the bad guys either through emotional trickery or general badassery. As Cataleya makes her way through her victims, we come to see the full extent of her training, with a particularly well planned assassination near the beginning of the movie. Apparently her uncle trained her, though he doesn't seem the type to slip into a black catsuit and swing around all over the place.

I put this movie on with the intention of doing other stuff while watching it, but Colombiana did a pretty good job of dragging me in and making me pay attention. The scenes are well structured, with just enough character development slotted in between all the killings. The only problem is that our heroine seems to fizzle out somewhat. We start off with a meticulously planned break-in and murder, but as she progresses she just seems to throw all plans out of the window and opt to just run in with guns blazing. Maybe it's just to match her fiery passion and thirst for vengeance, but it just seemed a bit off, especially in the final scenes of the film, which left much less of an emotional impact than they could have done.

Still, Colombiana is a good movie. It's not quite up to Hanna standards in the trained assassin genre, but it certainly held my attention.

My rating: 4/5