I actually liked it, it was better than I expected. Right dose of action, pain and rage. Zoe Saldana does a good job, and the little girl playing her as a child was good too :-) Actually, nobody was bad here, the FBI and CIA actors were good enough as well. I didn’t care much for the bad guys, but that was the role.
It starts in Colombia, a man working for big boss Luis wanted out, but as expected he wasn’t allowed to. Immediately some men are sent to his house, to kill him and his family. He knows it, but wastes a few seconds to instruct his 9-year-old daughter on what to do. After bad guy Marco kills her parents, he sits with her, telling her he was her father’s good friend, asking for the microchip her father had. She sits there without a word, seemingly overwhelmed by what just happened, then she pounces forward sticking a knife into his hand, saying that she wants “to kill don Luis”, then she rushes out. She’s little, she sneaks out of a window and starts running. She swallows the chip so not to lose it, she runs and goes down a manhole to lose them, then as her father instructed she reaches the American Embassy giving them the chip (she has to throw it up actually) which is “her passport”, as her father told her, to go to America. Once in America, she escapes their custody to reach Chicago, where her uncle leaves. He thought the entire family had been killed, and is glad to see her alive. He himself killed the people that killed his son, and now he watches this little girl saying “I want to be a killer, can you help?” - “sure”.
He pays a lot of money to get her into a school, telling her that weapons are not enough, she must learn many things or she’ll be killed in no time (he says in five years). He tells her she must become smart, understand people, know things, so she agrees and goes to school.
We see her again 15 years later. She’s now a killer. We see her pretending to be drunk to get arrested for the night so she can reach the man she wants to kill. Every time she kills someone, she draws a flower on them, because her name, Cataleya, is the name of a beautiful flower, an orchid.
It takes a while before the news of the ‘message’ gets out. She wanted the message to reach don Luis, so to find him. When her uncle learns about it, he’s angry, but the anger is driven by fear mostly, for what might happen. He’s the one keeping contacts and giving her new jobs, but is worried that ‘her way’ is too dangerous, for her, for him, for his mother.
Under the name Jennifer, from time to time she spends time with Danny, mostly showing up at his place to stay with him a few hours before disappearing. He really likes her but she won’t tell him anything about her. It’s the usual story, although the sexes were usually reversed. He’s a good person, he really likes her, but she comes and goes as she pleases and he doesn’t understand why. He even delays sex once to ask her something about her, anything, managing to get only a little thing out of her, that she doesn’t eat breakfast and also:
“I feel lonely sometimes” - “thank you, me too”.
The fact that he doesn’t know anything about her is the reason why he’s not at all careful, because he doesn’t know he needs to be, so he takes a picture of her while she’s sleeping and shows it to a friend, who thinks he’s helping him when he asks his sister-in-law to track her using the picture, since she works at the police (... how would that work if she was a normal person? Why should the police computer find her picture anywhere? This bit was rather... nonsense?)
Anyway, for some reason the FBI tracks it, the poor woman who was only doing him a favour will get in trouble, we see the FBI reading her her rights, and the FBI finds Cataleya’s place. She was on the phone with Danny and he told her about the picture, so she got agitated and saw a swat team arriving, so she got out somewhat in time. She went home to find her uncle and grandma dead, killed by don Luis’ men.
Next thing, she shows up at the FBI man’s house. How did she know that it was him chasing her or how did she know where to find him? Well, I don’t know, but James Bond and all the other action heroes do this all the time, so I’m not really bothered by this.
She tells him about her family being killed by don Luis, both when she was a child and now, and tells him that she wants to put an end to it, she wants don Luis, and wants him to give him to her. He doesn’t know where he is, but the CIA does, who knows why they know exactly where he is but they let him be. Cataleya threatens to hurt his family if he doesn’t find him for her, so he goes to the CIA man, what a coincidence the exact man we once saw exiting don Luis’ house, and no surprise the CIA man acts all arrogant as usual, not helping at all, unmoved by the story of his family being threatened. Right when FBI Ross is about to go away, she calls him, threatening the CIA man’s life, which she proves by firing, shooting a picture near him, and now he is finally ‘moved’ by something and immediately gives the address. (I liked how scared the CIA guy suddenly looked, the fear in his voice, good job :D )
Cataleya finds the floor plants for don Luis’ place, and she barges in fully armed , starting with a rocket moving on to machine guns, taking out all his men. The real showdown is between her and Marco, the one who executed all the killings, a good fight that she manages to win. He was stronger, but she had lived for this and wouldn’t let him stop her, trying to hit where it hurts (which also means neck/face)
After he dies, she stumbles backwards, in tears for all the repressed emotions of so many years, after all this time she finally avenged her family’s death.
Don Luis gets out, thinks he made it, but she expected that, he’s the big boss that everyone was trying to protect. She put her two big dogs in the back of the van, and they are so well trained that they stayed there not moving, without a sound, so he didn’t noticed them, until she calls him and the dogs hear her saying EAT, which is the signal that they can eat, and the dogs attack him and kill him. It’s over.
Danny is being questioned by the FBI but he really has nothing to do with it so they will have to let him go. She calls him, knowing that the call will be traced: he apologises for the picture-thing, then she says they have little time to talk, he has time for three questions, so he asks her her real name, then he asks her if she’ll ever come back (we’ll see) and third, he tells her that he loves her :-)
After the call, she stays a few seconds holding the receiver in her hand, controlling her emotions, and for some reason I felt touched by the flyer attached to the back of the public phone, ‘reward lost cat’, clearly from someone who wanted back their lost cat, and it seemed so much like what was happening there between the two of them :-)
Then she gets on a bus and goes away.
Cast
Cataleya-Zoe Saldana
Danny-Michael Vartan
Cataleya age 9 - Amandla Stenberg
Marco-Jordi Mollà
Uncle-Cliff Curtis
CIA man-Callum Blue
Ross-Lennie James
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