*I just needed to get to the core of how this movie troubled me by getting to talk about specific scenes that make no bleeding sense. So if you’re worried about being spoiled with this movie then don’t read any further.

The action genre of filmmaking is one of the most critically disliked genres of all I believe at sometimes. While over the years some form of criteria has been assembled as to what makes a “good” action sequence it’s always made the story to be a problem rather than a friend, and therein lays the biggest problem with Colombiana.

What this film is meant to do it does well, for the most part. The film’s general glorified overly meticulously designed almost impossible assassination sequences are great to watch and they’re fun. You sit in your seat staring at the big screen ahead of you with your face emoting shock as you see tiny little Saldana work her way through the smallest of cavities of a building or using the most mundane of objects as the linchpin of her assassination scheme.

So I find it almost unfair to complain about the things that didn’t work in this movie, since it’s all the things that never seem to work in 90% of the action films out there. Its logic and story structure is a complete mess. There are so many scenes where characters say things that make almost no sense and do things without much consequence that you can’t imagine how they were ignored.

Cataleya (Zoe Saldana) decides after seeing her mother and father murdered, by whom I can only assume is the big drug kingpin in Colombia, that she wants to become a “killer” so as to be able to enact revenge. Part of her grand scheme is, since she doesn’t know how to find her parents’ killer, to smoke them out by marking each of her amazing murders with a message that only she and these men would understand. However, since it’s such a peculiar detail the authorities refuse to release it to the press, until four years later. Now you would imagine that either the police would use the same logic for why, four years later, they decide to release this information a lot earlier therefore pushing the story along, or Cataleya would realise that this message isn’t getting out and do something different.

There’s a scene where Emilio (Cliff Curtis) shoots randomly around a school in broad daylight on a whim to prove a point to young Cataleya. I find it immensely hilarious how he never has to worry about the police or anyone seemingly staring directly at him, as he takes his time to expose his reasoning for why Cataleya needs to do things his way.

Also there’s a romance ongoing with Cataleya and Danny (Michael Vartan) that makes almost no sense. We don’t see the beginning of it, and it’s very obvious that Saldana’s character is using this man just for sex pretty much. However, it’s also obvious that this man wants more and it seems that this arrangement, i.e. shamble of a relationship, and has been going on for a few months at least due to the way they interact. Who is his friend that immediately sends a photo of his supposed girlfriend to the DMV for identification without thought? This makes no sense other than a painfully obvious plot point used to get the police closer to Cataleya.

When the talking ends and the bullets start whizzing by the film is fun enough to truly enjoy. The only problem with that is that when it’s time for Cataleya to exact her revenge the action film style changes from this exact science of a killing to a free for all brawl that Saldana enters into and immediately due to chaotic filmmaking the action becomes too hard to decipher that it’s almost unbearable.

Rating: 5.0/10