Colombiana Review: A Revenge Plot Built on a Flower, and Nothing Else

Cataleya Restrepo spends fifteen years training to be a weapon, and the movie she stars in never quite figures out why she should matter to anyone else. Colombiana wants to be a revenge thriller with a vengeance plot built on a single orchid-shaped flower left at every crime scene. It gets the flower right. It gets the revenge wrong.

Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.

The Setup

The story opens in 1992 in Bogota, Colombia. Don Luis Sandoval, a drug lord, orders his enforcer Marco and a gang of armed men to kill Cataleya’s father Fabio and his family because Fabio has tried to leave Sandoval’s drug operation. Fabio gives his nine-year-old daughter Cataleya a memory card loaded with information on Sandoval’s business, telling her it’s her “passport.” He also gives her the address of her uncle Emilio in Chicago and hands her her mother’s cataleya orchid necklace.

Fabio and his wife Alicia are gunned down. Cataleya escapes and seeks asylum at the U.S. Embassy, where she is granted passage to the United States after handing over the memory card. American officials try to put her into foster care, but Cataleya asks her uncle to train her as a killer. Fifteen years later, in 2007, Cataleya has become an accomplished assassin. Emilio serves as her broker, providing her with contracts. She leaves the cataleya flower at every murder scene, hoping one day to draw Sandoval’s attention so she can take her revenge.

Saldaña’s Problem

Zoe Saldaña plays Cataleya across the whole film, from the nine-year-old girl to the grown woman. The performance is sharp, controlled, and entirely unconvincing. Saldaña is capable of menace, but she never makes Cataleya feel like a person with grief or a motive beyond scoring points on a board. The script treats her as a machine with a scorecard, and Saldaña reads it that way.

A Revenge Machine

The revenge plot itself is thin. Cataleya kills men connected to Sandoval, leaving the flower at each scene, and hopes one day to attract his attention. That’s the entire plan. There’s no escalation, no strategy, no cost to her actions beyond the occasional bullet wound. The movie treats her vengeance as a puzzle to solve, not a human arc to watch.

Emilio is meant to be the emotional anchor, the uncle who loves Cataleya but fears her. He pleads with her to stop when he learns she has been targeting men connected to Sandoval, begging her not to endanger his own family. Cataleya admits she doesn’t care about the risk to his family. That moment should land hard. It doesn’t, because the film has spent so long treating Cataleya as a killing machine that her admission reads as mechanical rather than monstrous.

The Technical Parts

The action sequences are the film’s strongest element. Colombiana is directed by Olivier Megaton, and his background in music videos shows in the staging of fights and chases. The set pieces are choreographed with energy, even when the logic behind them falls apart. The film’s production budget was $40 million, and that money shows up in the stunts and the staging, even if the story underneath it is hollow.

The Numbers

Chronology

Where It Falls Short

Luc Besson wrote and produced the film. The plotting feels schematic, built around set pieces rather than character. The film never explains why Cataleya cares about Sandoval specifically, or why she believes killing his associates will bring her closer to him. The revenge is abstract, and the abstraction is the problem.

The Verdict

Colombiana is a competent, occasionally thrilling action picture that can’t support the weight of its own premise. Zoe Saldaña is a strong physical performer, but the script gives her nothing to work with beyond a scorecard and a flower. The action holds attention. The revenge plot doesn’t earn it.

action thriller · Colombiana · movie review · Olivier Megaton · Zoe Saldaña