Review of Colombiana (2011) by Shiira — 19 Oct 2011

Restraint isn't a word that you'd normally associate with filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, especially in "Kill Bill: Vol. 1", the Grand Guignol revenge spectacle, starring Uma Thurman as The Bride, the be-all and end-all of female vigilantes, who keeps killing until there's nobody left to kill.

Despite the high body count, the film does have a moral center as it pertains to children, unlike cross-generational films such as John Carpenter's "Assault on Precinct 13"(where during the infamous ice cream truck sequence, a little girl is graphically shot in the chest), and the recent "Kick-Ass", featuring Chloe Moretz, who as Hit Girl, similar to young Cataleya in "Colombiana", seems way too wise beyond her years, in regard to violence.

In retrospect, Tarantino has his limits. Vernita, a.k.a. "Copperhead", allows her daughter Nikki to have a childhood(in "Kill Bill: Vol. 2", Bill turns out to be a surprisingly good parent, too), and in return, The Bride allows the girl to live, even though a double homicide would have been cleaner.

Nikki acts like how a little girl should, when confronted with the sight of some strange woman removing a knife from her mother's chest. She does nothing. A recent slate of films(in addition to "Kick-Ass", there is also Joe Wright's "Hanna" and Jaume Collet-Serra's "Orphan) makes it seem completely natural that a child should stab or shoot like a pro.

Tarantino understands that Nikki is too young for murder; too unformed for vengeance, so she just stands there, shellshocked, as The Bride wipes the blood off from her blade. In "Colombiana", however, taking its cues from those aforementioned movies, in which kids commit violent acts with a disproportionate amount of competence, and more disturbingly, with steely resolve, Cataleya pins the hand of a drug lord's henchman to the table, and declares her intention "to kill Don Luis," only moments after a hit squad orphans the girl, as if maiming a grown man, then escaping through an open window, and scaling down a building, followed by her outrunning a pack of angry Colombians through a shanty town, is par for the course, despite being nine.

To put her exploits in perspective, Paul Kersey(Charles Bronson), perhaps, the most famous vigilante of them all, whose actions in the "Death Wish" movies inspired real-life copycats, is downright tentative in responding to the home invaders that destroys his family.

The ease in which Cataleya handles a knife becomes a contextual indicator of violence in regard to its cultural evolution from being a man's business to mere kid's play, since Bronson's first weapon isn't a gun, but a sock filled with quarters, twenty dollars worth, which he acquires from the bank, in lieu of procuring a real weapon from an arms dealer.

Ironically, it's the architect who possesses a childish armament, whereas Cataleya, upon arriving in the states, announces to her older brother that she wants to be a killer. The girl turns Bronson into Macaulay Culkin; when Paul is home alone, he swings the sock over his head.

Emilio tries to deter Cataleya from her plan by shooting over a crowd to no avail. "Colombiana" avoids controversy by cutting to Cataleya all grown up, thereby averting the unsettling sight of a homicidal minor.

As an adult, Cataleya is played by Zoe Saldana, and because of her skin color, the kneejerk response is to link her to blaxploitation stars such as Pam Grier and Tamara Dobson, since the film itself is being marketed as a sort of black "Le Femme Nikita".

But where's the camp value? To put it in politically incorrect terms, Cataleya kills like a white woman, a female vigilante more akin to Camille Keaton in "Day of the Women", and especially, Christina Lindberg in "Thriller: A Cruel Picture"; women with sadism on their minds.

For a heroin, the 1973 Bo Arne Vibenius cult classic had a heroin-addled farm girl(made mute by rape), who goes on a killing spree after escaping from a life of sex slavery. Although Madeline's vengeance is justified(she shoots her johns, both male and female), there's no condoning her deviation from the hit list when the one-eyed girl kills two cops, and the innocent motorists she runs off the highway.

By the time Madeline gets to Tony, the purity of the girl's mission is all but compromised, due to the pleasure she derives from her use of torture on the pimp. It's the ruination of all vigilantes, the humanity that becomes mislaid as they hazard through their righteous quest, in which the wronged person becomes the very thing he/she hates, a cold-blooded killer.

Instead of a horse, Cataleya uses sharks and dogs to do her pernicious bidding. This tag killer(an orchid) is not the little girl who watched her parents get murdered. She becomes an evil that both Emilio and the film itself doesn't seem to grasp.

"Colombiana" is as desensitized to violence as Cataleya seems to be. It's left to the moviegoer to judge this serial murderer.