Colombiana (2011)

Colombiana arrives bearing the fingerprints of a franchise that never was. Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen originally drafted the material as a sequel to Léon: The Professional, then reworked it into a standalone vehicle for Zoe Saldaña, who plays Cataleya Restrepo, a nine-year-old witness to her parents' murder in Bogotá who grows into a contract killer leaving orchids at the scene. The casting deserves a quiet nod. A Latina headliner carrying a 2011 studio action picture, surrounded by Latino actors playing Colombians and their diaspora, was not yet routine, and the film never pauses to congratulate itself for it. The setting required it. Nobody made a speech.

On the question of female empowerment, this is genre furniture wearing a nice coat. Cataleya out-fights, out-shoots and out-thinks every man on screen, continuing a Besson tradition that runs from Nikita through Léon. But the camera regards her the way it regards any bruised lovely, and the screenplay hands her no argument, only a necklace and a grudge. This is a B-movie blast of bloody blam blam, as one critic put it, and the film seems aware of the fact.

The politics are where things get read in, not put in. Colombian cartel violence supplies the premise, and a nonprofit called PorColombia objected that the film stereotyped the country, drawing from Saldaña a dismissal of visible irritation. A scholarly essay later recast Cataleya as a global-south figure punishing the wealthy and corrupt global north. That reading is available. It is also generous. The villains are drug lords and venal intelligence agents, not capital itself, and no systemic critique is offered, no sermon, no lecture. What we have is pulp revenge with excellent posture, and pulp revenge with excellent posture does not change the world.