Colombiana

Colombiana’s tagline is “Vengeance is Beautiful.”  I’d have made it, “You’ll believe a 115-lb wisp can kick a grown man’s ass.”

The film begins in Bogota, a hot, dusty, and overcrowded series of favelas in which sweaty, grimy men kill for a dollar.  Coincidentally, I’m in Bogota as I write this.  As I look out my hotel window in this city at 8600’ above sea level, I see pines and walnut trees, green grass and a park.  It’s 68°.  The people are better-dressed than the average American.  So really, the film doesn’t begin in Bogota at all.  It begins in the Scary South American Drug Haven of Euro-American imagination.  That’s fine, because the film exists in the world of imagination.  It imagines that Zoe Saldana, an attractive and athletic woman who looks like she never ate a cheeseburger in her life, can deliver a punch that’d actually, y’know, hurt.  It imagines that a villain sophisticated enough to pull off a $50M Ponzi scheme would be a Z-grade vulgarian willing to blow his entire take in the first five years, going by his choices in housing, entertainment, and personal protection.  It imagines, well, it imagines a lot of things.  Your enjoyment of this film will hinge upon your willingness to imagine along with it.

Are you willing, for example, to imagine that a parkour-inspired chase sequence actually happens, since the film cuts so quickly from shot to shot that we never actually see any of the stuntmen do anything?  Are you willing to imagine that Zaldana is capable of learning and performing a fight routine, since the film never actually shows us one?  Are you willing to imagine that a top-notch revenge thriller is unspooling before you?

Me, I’m willing.  And not just because Saldana looks great in a catsuit.  I’m willing because Saldana sells it.  She sells smart and menacing and deadly so well that I didn’t even consider the film’s implausibilities until I sat down to write this.  When Saldana declares her need for vengeance (yes, this is just another revenge thriller), when she chaos-cinemas her way through an army of bad guys, I believe it because she believes it.  This woman’s gonna be a big, big star because if anyone can make an audience believe that a 115-lb wisp can do whatever she damn well pleases, it’s Zoe Saldana.

So enjoy your trip to Fantasyland and groove on the ‘splosions and dig the gunfights and all that.  Let your imagination run wild.  Zoe Saldana will help you believe; and it’s beautiful, man.