Normally when I do a review, I write in stream of consciousness. Sometimes I forget to add things but I get the general idea of what I'm thinking down on the page. It also allows me to have a bit more of a voice in my writing than to make just some impersonal review. This is me. But this time I'm just at a loss. I don't know how to convey to you my readers just how bad this movie truely is. Is it the worst movie I've ever seen? No. I've seen far worse movies but I dare say not many. But this time I need to make this a bit more organized because there's just so much stupid it's like being hip deep in mud. So, welcome all to a special storytelling class that is sure to enlighten.
Storytelling 101.
Lesson #1: You have to introduce a character before you do something to him/her. One would think this is fairly obvious. What emotional investment do you have if you don't know who the character is? Imagine if you will, Cinderella was not the story of Cinderella but of the fairy godmother and she just randomly chooses someone to give all the nice things she does so that person can go to the ball and live happily ever after. I'd like to think my first question is: who was that you gave all the stuff to? Why did you do that? Introduce the character before something happens to the character.
In this movie we see a guy get killed in prison by Cataleya (Zoe Saldana). This isn't a spoiler since it's in the trailer. I bring this up because the guy she kills we never seen before, don't know his name, don't really know why she killed him, or why she had such an elaborate plan to kill him. (more on "the plan" in lesson 2) Can you see the problem here? She killed a guy, went through a lot of trouble to kill this guy, and I do not know who the f*** he is! WHY!???!!!!
Lesson #2 You can't "plan" random events. Let's walk through that baffling killing scene, shall we?
Step 1: she wears a disguise and pretends to be really drunk and crashes into a police car.
Step 2: she is taken to a jail cell where she pretends to be asleep.
Step 3: In comes random bad guy ONE DAY EARLY who at least looks South American under FBI security. He's put in a different jail cell in a separate part of the holding area from Cataleya.
Step 4: Cataleya puts on her ninja outfit (I'm not kidding) and picks the lock on the cell door with a hairpin she had in her wig. (the police didn't bother to take her personal effects even though she nearly killed 2 cops in a DWI)
Step 5: She adjusts the camera so she can move freely without being seen. She did this despite the security guy looking right at the monitor as he turned on his radio to listen to the baseball game.
Step 6: She gets a glass of water and a spoon, picks the lock to the power room, and MacGyvers the power box to turn off at the exact second she needed so she can slip by a fan she coudn't possibly have known where it was and have the police officer not get curious why there was a glass of water and a spoon inside a secure room nobody ever went into.
Step 7: she crawls through the air vents until she somehow sneaks into the men's bathroom.
Step 8: the guard watching the prisoner she is about to murder needs to use the bathroom so he goes into the bathroom where Cataleya is waiting and knocks him out.
Step 9: she uses the unconscious guard to get access to the holding area where this guy is in his cell fast asleep.
Step 10: she draws a flower on his chest, wakes him up, tells him to unbutton his shirt (no idea why she buttoned it up again for him.) and shoots him in the chest and in the head.
Step 11: this of course alerts the police immediately because guns are very loud. She escapes through the air vent, manages to slip past all the police in the entire building, sneak back into her own cell, change clothes, pretend to be asleep before they come in to check on her.
If you believe even half of that could ever happen in real life let alone be meticulously planned out then this movie is for you.
Lesson #3: If you want dramatic effect, DON'T KILL MAIN SUPPORTING CHARACTERS OFF CAMERA! Oh more on Uncle Emelio I promise but how do you make such a stupid mistake? What's the best way to establish the villian as someone we don't like? What's the best way to pull at an audience's heart? Oh, I don't know.... KILL UNCLE BEN! In Spiderman, we get a lovely speach from Uncle Ben about the importance of duty and responsibility only to have him die a short time later. He at least lived long enough to die in Peter's arms. Here: he's just dead. Mama is dead, Tio is dead, and his friend the dog keeper? (I swear I never heard this guy's name but he's there too. He was in one scene where she goes to some random place to feed 2 rotweilers and pick up a passport.) THEY ALL DIED OFF CAMERA! And we all knew the exact moment they were going to die too. Cataleya showed up at church and sat next to Mama. They were all one happy family. And no sooner does she say that, but we see Marco (Jordi Malla) the guy who killed Catalaya's Mom and Dad and who Catalaya stabbed in the hand when she was 10.
Lesson #4: Don't contradict your own movie! It starts simple enough. Catalaya stabs Marco in the hand, some hired goons start shooting at her as she runs away. Marco says, "We need her alive!" Cut to a few minutes later. After 10 year old Catalaya impresses the audience with some lovely Parkour, she slips into an open storm drain where Marco and the others start shooting at her randomly.
Strike 1.
Next, don't make Uncle Emilio into some kind of voice of reason when it comes to killing people! Uncle Emilio and Catalaya are getting registered for school. She says she doesn't want to go. She just wants to learn how to kill people. So Uncle takes out his gun and kills a random motorist. He did this to show that any idiot can kill but smart killers live longer. Fast forward 15 years later. He wants her to get out of the business because he fears for her safety and has remorse for all that she's done.
Strike 2.
Finally, after her family is all dead, Cataleya goes to Agent Ross of the FBI (I'm not kidding. I didn't know this guy's name until I looked it up on IMDB.) and threatens to kill his family one at a time until he tells her where to find Don Luis. You see Don Luis is the guy her father used to work for before he was killed. Since then he's been living in New Orleans under CIA protection because..........
Strike 3.
You can't do something like that! You can't! You can't make us like a character and then make her act like a terrorist! Are you insane?!?
Lesson #5: If you are going to make an action movie, PUT ACTION IN IT! I swear as God as my witness there is only ONE hand-to-hand fight scene in this movie and if there were any logic in this world, it wouldn't have happened. I'm thinking back on this but I can count maybe 3 action scenes in the entire movie. I'm not counting the scene where she kills that fat guy because it really was just her shooting the guy and letting sharks eat him alive. There were at least 3 sex scenes in this movie. If there is more sex in your movie than action, IT'S NOT AN ACTION MOVIE!
Lesson #6 Figure out where your movie takes place. Don't call your movie Colombiana if you are only in Colombia for TEN MINUTES! The vast majority of the movie takes place in the United States. Zoe Saldana doesn't even attempt a South American accent. The only member of the cast that is remotely Spanish is Jordi Malla and he's from Spain not Colombia.
Lesson #7 Don't put in a love interest just for the sake of having one! Catalaya has a "boyfriend" (Danny: Played by Michael Vartan) I use that term very loosely because she never tells him her real name until the end of the movie, whenever she comes over to his apartment, they don't have any meaningful conversations; it's just for sex. And by the end of the movie Danny is willing to risk Federal prison charges for being associated with a now known terrorist/vigilante because he "loves" her. Dude. Seriously? Was the sex really that good? She systematically lied to you. A LOT! You don't even know her real name! You're going to be sent to prison to make friends with some very large man named Sprinkles and all you can say is you "love" her? Wow movie. Wow.
Lesson #8 The FBI doesn't have a world wide dragnet looking at everyone's cell phones! The only way they could ever find Catalaya was by chance. I'm dead serious. Danny took a picture of Catalaya while she was asleep and showed it to a friend. (no name given. ARGH!) Friend then sends the picture to random fat cop woman (no name). Random fat cop woman then runs the picture through her computer for reason: shut up this gets the movie over. And this immediately appears on Agent Ross' computer like the bat signal because up until this point we just established that we are indeed looking for a woman. I will repeat that. It needs repeating. The FBI was positive that 23 people could NOT have been killed by a woman. Until they finally joined us in the 21st century and decided it is indeed a woman. A woman who we don't have an ID for or a picture. But the minute this random fat cop woman ran a search on her computer for the half face of Catalaya, she can't even get up to go to the bathroom before the FBI has taken her computer and placed her under arrest.
Lesson #9 Don't assume I know people I've never seen before. The police are in a briefing talking about all the people Catalaya has killed. At one point Agent Ross stops and just says, "if you don't know who these twins are, you don't belong in this room." Okay. Fair enough. Where's the exit and I'll take my 8 dollars back too! Okay. Yes. I get it. Catalaya killed a lot of bad people. She's a vigilante and you have to bring her in. But so far the only people we know she killed was the one random guy in the holding cell, black guy who isn't Notorious BIG, and blonde could be a hooker woman. The only way I even know the last two is because you told us!
Lesson #10 If your star isn't very good at fighting, DON'T CAST HER IN AN ACTION MOVIE! I said earlier Zoe Saldana was in exactly 1 hand-to-hand fight. And considering the fight we did get, I think it's one fight too many. And it's not a fight that needed to happen. Pop Quiz: You have a gun drawn on the man who killed your mother and father. (off screen in another room despite your insistance that it was right in front of you.) The man doesn't have a gun and he is cornered in the bathroom. Do you A) engage in polite chit chat B) get in close enough so that he can disarm you C) try to stab him to death with a pair of tooth brushes or D) TAP TWO IN HIS HEAD AND FIND HIS BOSS! Guess which one she chose to do: If you guessed E... do A, B, and C then you win the cupie doll! The fight scene was shot in close up with shaky camera and the director's finger on the fast forward button. To say it looked bad is an understatement. By the way, I'm pretty sure that you can't kill someone by removing the top of a glock 9mm and jamming it into a guy's throat like it was a knife.
And finally
Lesson #11 For the love of all that is sacred and holy. Stop making the Leader so cliche that he feels some need to taunt the hero before the hero kills him! It's so painfully stupid I don't even want to talk about it. But, this is the cross I bare in being a film reviewer. This is to be instructive after all. Here goes. Big Bad Don Luis is stuck behind a garbage truck. You see he managed to flee during the intensely stupid fight scene climax. He got into a nice black van and sped away. Catalaya calls him on Marco's cell phone. Being all confident that he bravely ran away, he starts taunting her like he was Dr. No. Little did he know that Catalaya has super powers of Deus Ex Machina and her 2 rotweilers are in the van with him. And he never noticed they were there. With one command of EAT, the dogs kill Don Luis and our movie can finally limp to the end.
I hope this has been instructive. And while I don't ask for any sympathy since I've decided to do these things to myself, just remember I do this for you my dear readers so you don't have to waste your time and money on horrible movies.
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