Colomb-icon

It’s sad what has become of the action film.  Once a cham­pion at the box office, it has been replaced by CGI-driven spec­ta­cles and ghetto-ized into the straight-to-video world.

Still, there are a few who carry the torch for the genre and do their best to keep it at the mul­ti­plexes.  The team of Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen deserve kudos in this regard.  Besson serves as idea man, pro­ducer and some­times direc­tor with Kamen being the man who brings the sto­ries to fruition in script form.  Together, they’ve deliv­ered a string of wor­thy action fare like Kiss Of The Dragon, Unleashed and Taken.  However, they all can’t be hits — and Colombiana is an exam­ple of what hap­pens when the Besson/Kamen machine isn’t fir­ing on all cylinders.

The plot­line is stan­dard fod­der, right down to the quasi-feminist twist: Cataleya (Zoe Saldana) is an improb­a­bly sexy pro­fes­sional assas­sin.  She chose this line of work after see­ing her par­ents mur­dered by a drug king­pin in Bogota, which is shown in a pro­logue that makes up most of the first act.  However, she is endan­ger­ing her­self and the life of mentor/go-between Emilio (Cliff Curtis) by mak­ing her work per­sonal.  She is plot­ting revenge on her par­ents’ killers — and when they catch on to her game, the stakes are upped dra­mat­i­cally as the story works its way to a bullet-riddled finale.

If every beat of the above sounds famil­iar, it is.  Besson and Kamen’s story is com­posed entirely of char­ac­ters and story beats that have appeared in count­less action films over the last 30 years.  This wouldn’t be a prob­lem if the film has fresh twists to offer on these famil­iar ele­ments but it doesn’t.  There isn’t a sin­gle sur­prise applied to the plot­ting and characterizations.

To make mat­ters worse, there is a lazi­ness to the sto­ry­telling that sug­gest that Besson and Kamen didn’t think the story through with care.  The intro­duc­tory pro­logue goes on way too long and fre­quently bor­ders on self-parody.  It also includes a ludi­crous moment where Emilio forces Cataleya to choose whether she will live a nor­mal life or pur­sue revenge.  To force her hand, he does some­thing so implau­si­ble and mon­u­men­tally stu­pid that it might make you laugh out loud.

An even big­ger mis­take is made around the turn­ing point between acts two and three. Without get­ting too heav­ily into spoil­ers, the story hinges upon our hero­ine — sup­pos­edly a pro­fes­sional in her line of work — mak­ing a rookie-level mis­take in her revenge plan.  It’s the kind of thing that will pull any semi-experienced viewer right out of the story because it breaks the sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief these sto­ries require.  It’s also annoy­ing because it robs the dra­matic moments that fol­low of the oper­atic emo­tion they are obvi­ously reach­ing for.

The slip­shod sto­ry­telling is a shame because Colombiana has some moments where you can see a bet­ter action flick try­ing to break through.  The sequence where the adult Cataleya is intro­duced has her pulling off a tricky assas­si­na­tion in a jail that is as beau­ti­fully crafted as it is clever.  The finale also fea­tures a fan­tas­tic fight scene where Cataleya and a neme­sis square off in a tiny bath­room, tai­lor­ing down their fight­ing skills to the tiny space and using nor­mally harm­less bath­room items as weapons.  Conceptually, this cribs a bit from a famous fight in a pre­vi­ous Besson pro­duc­tion, District 13, but it’s done so well that fans won’t mind.

The film also sports an excel­lent cast.  Saldana is com­pelling as the hero­ine, giv­ing lev­els of com­mit­ment and emo­tion to the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion that make it seem more inter­est­ing than it actu­ally is.  Curtis is typ­i­cally reli­able as the men­tor, with he and Saldana prop­ping up oth­er­wise pro-forma ver­bal exchanges with a nice level of emo­tion, and Jordi Molla is supremely creepy as the cold-blooded main hench­man of the kingpin.

Simply put, Colombiana is a pro­gram­mer, and a lazy one at that.  The solid cast and flashy direc­tion from Besson pro­tégé Olivier Megaton can’t dis­guise that the story is merely a flimsy thread that barely keeps together a hand­ful of cool action set­pieces.  What remains can func­tion as a pass­able time-waster on t.v. dur­ing a Saturday after­noon — but Colombiana falls apart the sec­ond you start think­ing about it and it is intensely dis­ap­point­ing if you think of it as a fol­lowup to the superb Taken.  Besson and Kamen are capa­ble of much more so let’s hope they put more effort into their next storyline.