Shamelessly entertaining when it’s not just silly, Colombiana begins with a young girl trading one shady underworld for another. The first is that of Bogotá in 1992, where a deal between two heavies is going so well it can only mean someone’s about to die. That someone is the father of Cataleya (Amandla Stenberg), a schoolgirl who absorbs her father’s goodbye — a speech of family loyalty and legacy so archetypal Al Pacino mutters fragments of it in his sleep — with unblinking shock. “In this world,” an enemy henchman (Jordi Mollà) tells her as her parents lay dead, “Smart girls always get what they want.” With that Cataleya’s trance is broken, and a stabbing followed by a spectacular foot chase announces her transformation into a pint-sized badass.
The shadow announcement made by that sequence is that “this world” is the brainchild co-writer (with Robert Mark Kamen) and producer Luc Besson. “Vengeance is beautiful,” is Colombiana’s tagline, though it may not be smart, or even particularly specific. The vague provenance of the microchip that Cataleya winds up barfing onto an American embassy desk is part of the film’s passing acknowledgement of everything that is not the body of the adult Cataleya (Zoe Saldana) in head-cracking, lipstick-signing motion.
Having slipped the Feds, the orphaned Cataleya buses it to Chicago, where her murderer-for-hire uncle Emilio (Cliff Curtis) lives. When she tells him that she wants to study guns, not geometry, Emilio fires a few frustrated rounds into a playground. The audacity! How could a mere child get the fact that working through one’s…
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