Reviewed by Alicia Glass

Studio: Europa Corp.

MPAA Rating: PG 13

Director: Olivier Megaton

Review Rating: 7 Cateleya flowers

After witnessing her parents murder at the hands of Colombian drug lords as a young girl, our heroine grows up to be a stone-cold assassin, chasing her parents murderers.

It is a good movie, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t shake the feeling that it was made with the firm forward idea of showing off main character Zoe Saldana as much as possible. And boy do they do that – we have a well-trained assassin, ladies and gentlemen, running around Colombia and various parts of America, in her shorts-jammies and bodysuits, carrying huge guns. But this particular assassin has her own calling cards, leaving cateleya flowers at her kills, and is highly emotional and affected by these things she’s doing. We even have the booty call opposite that so wants to get to know our heroine better, because you know, he’s so sensitive and everything (where exactly do we find these men inAmerica again?) and he loves her and wants to be with just her. Which of course, one innocent little photo and bragging session, leads to the FBI getting far too damn close to our heroine as she’s closing in on the bad guys she’s been hunting all her life.

We all know Zoe Saldana’s list – Star Trek Zero, Avatar, even Pirates of the Carribean. This movie really shows off her toned body and restrained female emotional acting skillz. I always enjoy Lennie James, of Snatch and Jericho and Human Target and others, as the head FBI guy chasing our heroine. Michael Vartan, of Alias and Hawthorne fame, was a not-so-odd choice for the love interest Danny, as he’s all but the complete opposite of Saldana in every possible way. The rest of the cast is kind of just there for filler, bad guy NPC’s to die and that sort of thing.

For all that it’s a filler movie more or less, I enjoyed it. There are moments where Saldana gets to pull some nifty assassin trade trick you haven’t seen before, like Entrapment or The Thomas Crown Affair, but once she’s done that, the novelty is gone. And I can’t understand why they named the movie Colombiana, when the main character’s name happens to be Cateleya, and for the most part I don’t think the movie is in Colombia either. Colombiana gets a rating of 7 Cateleya flowers.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCxPLlFWdFo]