newjerseynewsroom.com

BY JOE TYRRELL

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

Like its wiry heroine, "Colombiana" is slightly constructed but still packs a punch.

Taking on yet another action role, Passaic-born Zoe Saldana powers through this revenge fantasy as a perpetual-motion killing machine.

As Catelaya Restrepo, she has her reasons. We meet her at age 9, a dutiful daughter at home in Bogotá, when some of her father's drug-business associates drive up to the house, guns blazing.

In his few remaining moments, Papa (Jesse Borrego) has time to slip a computer chip to his girl, bracingly well played in these early scenes by 12-year-old Amandla Stenberg.

Named after an orchid, young Catelaya is apparently a top member of the gymnastics team at Pablo Escobar Middle School. She eludes the rest in a chase sequence that would do Jason Bourne proud: over rooftops, down buildings, through markets and into sewers.

Arriving where she's been directed, young Cat then barfs up the swallowed chip, along with a large breakfast, on the desk of the CIA station chief, er, the military attaché at the U.S. Embassy.

Once in Miami, this very resourceful girl gives the slip to her CIA handler and takes a bus to Chicago to renew ties with relatives. All apples have remained directly under this family tree. Uncle Emilio (Cliff Curtis) may not be in law enforcement computers, but when young Catelaya arrives, he's busy beating a man tied in a chair.

When Cat tells him that she wants to be a killer and asks if he can help, his reply is, "Sure." But he does insist on the importance of education, shooting up a moving car on a Chicago street to make his point.

There's an antic spirit running through these scenes, a tip-off that the script is by Luc Besson, also the producer, and his frequent writing partner, Robert Mark Kamen, who was responsible for "The Karate Kid."

In the history of kick-ass heroines, you've got your real-life Scythian warrior princesses/Amazons, your Boadicea, your Jeanne d'Arc, your Fu Hao, your Molly Pitcher, your Rani Lakshmi Bai _ and then a whole armory of characters invented by Besson.

With the original "La Femme Nikita" in 1990, Besson turned gamin Anne Parillaud into something new, Audrey Hepburn with a very bad attitude and very big guns.

The result was an Anglo-American spy fantasy that had undergone French ironic waterboarding: a murderous junkie punk is enfolded to the bosom of the Republic, learns martial arts, appreciation of Nina Simone and how to twirl a scarf just so, then is released as a sober chic assassin.

"Nikita" has spawned several generations of offspring, including the current TV version featuring thin and buff Maggie Q, who captures some of the spirit of the original. Besson has kept recruiting, adding very young Natalie Portman in "The Professional" and very orange Milla Jovovich in "The Fifth Element."