Doing so gets her safely out of her cocaine-addled homeland, and onto the slightly less cocaine-addled streets of Chicago, Illinois. Little Cataleya doesn’t want to go to school, or buy pretty dresses, or even do more parkour. She wants revenge on the men who killed her parents. There’s only one thing causing Don Luis strife. His associates from the criminal underworld he’s nebulously in charge of? They keep ending up dead. In four years, twenty-two of them have died, with various words and a peculiar lipstick drawing of a lotus later found on their bodies. Could this perhaps be related to the girl (who happens to be named after a Colombian cultivar of lotus) whose parents he had killed a decade plus ago? The premise of Colombiana is a very simple one. In fact, it’s a common one for Luc Besson, who wrote this flick with frequent collaborator Robert Mark Kamen. Someone’s been wronged, and there will be bloody satisfaction had. In this case, that someone is a gorgeous woman with access to a whole lot of machine guns, and her bloody satisfaction will be had against a horde of Central American gangsters. You know what you’re getting from Colombiana just from the trailers alone. Saldana has a great look, physically, for the lithe and nimble assassin type, and her associated baddies all look like tough, bad dudes. She puts in a very good performance, especially by action movie standards. Don Luis, however, is pretty tough to understand due to his accent. Zoe also gets to carry the emotional weight of the movie, with a couple of good tearful breakdowns. She’s cold when she needs to be, and emotional when she has to be, and she’s a pretty impressive action movie chick, which isn’t much of a surprise. She’s tough, and her performance proves that. In particular, the climactic fight scene is nearly incomprehensible thanks to shaking cameras and too many cuts. That’s all your fault, Olivier Megaton; you did the same kind of thing to Transporter 3, and I’m still sad about it. Granted, Megaton is creative with the camera, but sometimes there’s too much creativity and not enough coherent storytelling US Correspondent Ron Hogan believes that Zoe Saldana should always wear a catsuit and carry around a rocket launcher. Find more by Ron daily at Shaktronics and PopFi.