Tough Chicks: Zoe Saldana- Colombiana
She drives rad cars, dresses like she’s in some sort of video game, and kills more fat bad guys than diabetes. Seeing how this movie was originally written as a sequel to Leon: The Professional with a starring role for Natalie Portman eyed, I would say that there are worse places to take this refurbished film than to have it star one of the most popular women in Hollywood in Zoe Saldana.
Colombiana is your prototypical revenge flick. No matter what the script or the finished product might look like, it was meant to be a story about a girl who lost her parents and grew up a stone cold killer with a real taste for theatrics when it comes to killing. The killing, which is meant to mostly be in retribution for her parents deaths, sometimes takes a backseat to the needless love interest, random police detectives and F.B.I. agents trailing her, and of course, the overly complicated action sequences. For a woman who is so passionate as to give up most of her life to training as an assassin and then killing a whole bunch of people, she sure gets easily sidetracked by moderately good looking dudes. She’s also maybe not as passionate about killing the bad guys as I thought because she certainly doesn’t show it on screen. Excuse me but I want my revenge a little “revengier”.
“Never forget where you came from.” Damn, this dude is a broken record. We get it, her parents were killed in front of her and it caused her to become some vengeance seeking assassin with a tight body and an artists eye for killing! Actually, that sounds pretty awesome! It’s too bad that writer Luc Besson’s vision for the young Mathilda from Leon wasn’t part of the final product because even typing that out makes me want to see it more. Car chases, church scenes, and other action stereotypes, Oh My! Colombiana has several cool sequences but ultimately misses the mark and I’m saddened to say that Paul Kersey would not approve of her work. Thanks for trying, though.
