Columbiana
starring Zoe Saldana, Michael Vartan, Cliff Curtis, Lennie James, Callum Blue and Jordi Mollà
written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen
directed by Olivier Megaton
Rating: ♦♦♦◊◊
Amandla Stenberg plays ten year old Cataleya who sees her parents murdered by a drug cartel in Bogota. Carrying a secret list of incriminating information about the drug lords she flees to the U.S. embassy. (Her father told her to go there in case of anything bad overtaking them.) Cataleya is granted asylum in the U.S. and once there she tracks down an uncle living in Chicago and is taken in. Family is family, after all. But like Natalie Portman’s 12-year-old Mathilda in Leon (1994), she quickly expresses a desire to be an assassin. Cataleya’s uncle is involved in the Columbian underworld, which puts him in a position to oversee this. And he does. The little girl grows up to be Zoe Saldana, and a damned hot assassin.
This is another Luc Besson film. Even if you didn’t know it beforehand you could surmise it after only a few minutes because of its giveaway weirdness. Besson seems to have a fetish about female hit men. Especially young girls. Specifically I am thinking of Leon, and Nikita (1990, starring Anne Parillaud his ex-wife, it was remade in English in 1993 as Point of No Return, also called The Assassin starring Bridget Fonda, directed by John Badham).