Film Review | Columbiana

Sex and violence will sell till the earth ceases to turn – and if you go by certain popular prophecies making the rounds of late, that should be very very soon – but nevertheless, we tend to accept that you need more than a couple of bullets flying and a couple of shirts being ripped off to make a fully fledged film worth remembering, nay, watching.

And one such example of gimmicky, disposable dross is this month’s exploitation-lite action piece brought to us by former director and now schlock producer extraordinarie Luc Besson.

Once a solid filmmaker both in his native France and beyond, Besson was responsible for some of the zaniest, and most entertaining genre films of the 90s. Chief of these, and drawing from his earlier cult hit Nikita, was Leon – the story of a young girl who trains to become a hit woman after her parents were murdered by a corrupt policeman – introduced the world to Natalie Portman, then a mere 12 year old and already reared for stardom after the edgy role bestowed upon her by Mr Besson.

True to form, while Columbiana is not actually directed by Besson – he produces and ‘presents’… which is all he seems to be doing these days – the film opens with a shot of a cigar-chomping, sneering ‘foreign’ villain planning the demise of a business rival and the murder of his family.

To cut a long – and nauseatingly familiar – story short, we are introduced to our heroine as (wait for it) her parents are summarily dispatched by the Columbian crimelords her father was embroiled into business with and, having already been trained to wound seriously if not kill, Cataleya (Amandla Stenberg) escapes with information apparently vital to the authorities and, a few years on when her fighting-and-killing skills appear to have magically improved (and after she morphs into the gorgeous Zoe Saldana) we find her still hot on the trail of her parents’ killers, led by the devious Don Luis (Beto Benites).

And that’s pretty much it. A typically coy romance with hunky artist Richard (Callum Blue) is about the only kink in this systematic quest for revenge, and though it’s directed by fellow countryman Oliver Megaton, there are enough ‘Bessonianisms’ for this to pass as a piece of work by the Gallic schlockmeister himself.

There’s skintight-jumpsuit asskicking (recalling Milla Jovovich’s near-nude traipsing around in The Fifth Element), there’s plenty of sex (some suggested, some shown), there’s even a spot of utterly pointless sexy dancing from the titular heroine herself – all the more baffling because she’s supposed to be a stone-cold badass.

This might be unnecessary nitpicking, but it’s difficult to deny that the bad does come to the fore when you’re dealing with a plot that you can predict from a mile off, with atrocious lines delivered in the numbest way possible by actors who clearly would rather be somewhere else. (And the lines are awful: there’s something particularly bad about Hollywood clichés being translated back into Hollywood by a European source).

But the one thing you can’t say about Columbiana is that it tries to be anything other than it in fact is. It’s shamelessly unoriginal… so watching it or not is entirely up to you.