‘Miss
Bala,’ the 2011 Mexican film by the same name, gets adapted for the
English-speaking audience starring “Jane the Virgin” Gina Rodriguez. I wanted to see the original 2011 version but
never got around to it, so now I didn’t have to. No amount of panning (currently sitting
comfortably with a 23 percent RT score, only one percentage point above
‘Serenity’ – see below) by the critics is going to stop me.
In
this movie, Rodriguez plays Gloria Fuentes, a young twenty-something makeup
artist from La La Land who’s unwillingly swept into the dark and sordid
underworld of the drug trade during a visit with her BFF in Tijuana,
Mexico. A stranger in a not-so-strange
place, the hapless Latina who was at a party suddenly found herself a captive
in indentured servitude to Lino (Ismael Cruz Córdova resembling a younger version of Benicio Del Toro), the
magnetic and charismatic leader of the Las Estrellas criminal gang, who’s bold
and reckless enough in “lawless” Mexico to try and rub out the corrupt and pervy TJ
chief of police in public (which was how the innocent Gloria got into her
predicament in the first place). Among
the things she had to do for her new boss were car-bombing DEA safe-houses and
working as a mule like Clint Eastwood smuggling drugs across the
US-Mexico border (yeah, I know what your dirty little minds are thinking, sorry
to disappoint you).
As
an action/crime thriller, I found ‘Miss Bala’ to be a competent, well-directed
movie with an engaging female protagonist.
Like a toned-down PG-13 version of ‘Sicario’ and its sequel, it provides
a glimpse of the drug trade below the border as well as a portrait of the
desperation and despair of the victims caught up in it. Gloria’s transformation from helpless victim
at the beginning to angel of vengeance in the end was gloriously cathartic,
even if the undercurrents of female empowerment were laid on a bit thick. Or maybe I just like the scenes where she had
a red dress on and carried an AR-15 a little too much.
Grade: B
Grade: B
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