Review: "Colombiana" (2011)

Slinky, beautiful female assassin, born-from-childhood vengeance, greasy, mutilated crime-lord, it must be another Luc Besson action-thriller. Yes, truth be told the prolific French writer/producer/director has been diluting his brand recently with more bald-headed machismo humdingers like "The Transporter", "From Paris with Love" and "Taken", but "Colombiana", perhaps the most meager of them all, is the worst kind of throwback, its mimicry. 

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With deep echoes of Besson's crowning earlier works like "La Femme Nikita" and "Léon", this latest girl-with-a-gun exploitation flick is running purely on fumes. Set in the gold-dusted, grimy and thoroughly stereotypical Colombian drug trade, the film begins in Bogotá in 1992 and ends in present-day California with a resounding thud to the deep-seated baritone croons of Johnny Cash's "Hurt". 

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Zoe Saldana, fresh off of her kick-start 2009, plays the title character, the aforementioned vengeful assassin going on nearly two decades of bloodlust towards the man who killed her family. She dons all manner of skimpy attire, either while murdering pug-ugly thugs in shark-accented mansions or while dancing in her bare, security-heavy apartment. 

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Her plan of action, which confoundedly takes almost the entirety of the film to fully latch onto, involves a string of murders in which she paints (in a catty lipstick) the Cattleya orchid, her family's adopted crest, onto the chest of her victims in an attempt to lure out the men responsible, who are now under the protection of the CIA. 

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We're not only subjected to sit through these hit-jobs (witlessly composed by director Olivier Megaton) one-by-one until the inevitable, but also through one of the most dormant, misguided romances (with a hoodie-wearing sensitive painter) this side of Channing Tatum. 

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The problem with "Colombiana," aside from its obvious, painfully restricted aspirations, is that it's so lifelessly, straightly executed from top-to-bottom, side-to-side, that whatever imprudently enjoyable underwear-and-a-gun giddiness to be had is, sadly, mostly absent.  [D+]