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.

Taken

A group of actors is about to become unemployed.

There’s a certain kind of actor out there – you know the type. A thespian like Mark Dacascos, say, or Steven Segal or Jean-Claude Van Damme. This guy is a working actor, he’s paying the bills, and he’s turning out one direct-to-video feature after another. In one film, he’s an ex-soldier out for revenge. In another, a kung fu master come down from the mountaintop to get the precious MacGuffin. In yet another, he’s a cop, or a spy, or an accountant who works out a lot. It’s all the same, and it all pays the bills: the actor sneers, he shoots, he kicks people in the face. Then he goes home, cashes his check, and everybody’s happy.

And then, a Liam Neeson comes along. An Academy Award nominee. A marquee name. Darkman, for Pete’s sake! And he makes a movie like TAKEN, in which he plays an ex-CIA agent who is both Out for Revenge and Getting the MacGuffin. Not only does he act the pants off of everyone else in the genre, but it turns out he’s got some pretty good moves in the stunt department, to boot. Hey, Liam, bit of advice: it’s unwise to enter these guys’ territory. They may be desperate men.

TAKEN, then, serves as an exercise in the farfetched: what happens when you take a capable, respected actor, surround him with stuntmen, and tell him to go kick some ass? I’ll tell you what happens: asses get kicked, and they kicked by a guy whose conviction the audience never thinks to question. Liam Neeson takes TAKEN, your standard, DTV-type revenge / MacGuffin thriller, and elevates it to something more: a study in desperation, in love, and in high-class ass-kickery the likes of which you’ve never seen before.

In the process, however, TAKEN calls the entire future of the DTV thriller into question. Will Judi Dench soon play an edge – of – retirement assassin out to do one … last … job? When can we expect Sean Penn to show us his chops as an idealistic former cop who must kickbox his way through a corrupt police force to avenge his former partner? Personally, I’m holding out for the mother lode: Kate Winslet as a post-apocalyptic savior, preferably one with a totally awesome car, or maybe eyes that blink sideways.

It’s only a matter of time. But when that day comes, a certain class of actor will be out of work. It’ll be Neeson’s fault. Perhaps he can hire a few members of the old cadre as bodyguards.

The Transporter 2

The Transporter 2 takes direct aim at your inner child and gives it everything it could possibly want. If, that is, your inner child is a 15-year-old boy.

Fortunately, mine is: I had a great time with TT2. It's basically action porn, with a paper-thin plot just moving us from one set piece to the next. It pays minimal attention to character development or motivation, but it does spend a lot of time lovingly filming cars in various states of speeding, sliding, flying, rolling, and getting shot at. This is a movie that goes easy on the dialogue and heavy on the kicking of people in the face, and I enjoyed every minute of it. Bring on The Transporter 3!

District B13

If martial arts movies are basically dance movies with fake blood, DISTRICT B13 (the Americanized title of BANLIEU 13, a French martial arts picture) B13 is the kind of dance movie in which the editing gets in the way of the dancing.

The plot - well, nevermind. Who remembers the plot to SWING TIME? The fighting and acrobatics deliver plenty of thrills and not a few "rewind" moments, but the film's frenetic editing so detracts from the beauty and awesomness of the choreography and its execution that, by the climax, I wanted to put a brick through someone's AVID computer.

Nevertheless, B13 delivers on its audience's expectations. It offers enough of people kicking other people in the face, and doing so in new and creative ways, that it's sure to please action and martial arts fans. Just don't expect to know whether you're watching the result of athleticism and precision or clever editing.