Miss Bala (Review)
Miss Bala Tries to Make Jane the Virgin into Jane the Badass.
I’ll admit that I wasn’t excited to see Miss Bala when the trailer first hit. Don’t get me wrong, I love badass female-led action films like Atomic Blonde or Peppermint. However, something told me that this was going to be a far cry from the likes of those, especially given that it was being helmed by the director of Twilight. Unfortunately, my first impression proved to be right on the money as Miss Bala proves to be a cliche-riddled attempt at an empowering action film that lacks the substance to make its heroine truly inspiring.
There’s no denying that Gina Rodriguez has become one of the big up and comers in Hollywood. So, it only make sense for her to try to jump into a new genre to prove her worth as an action heroine. However, Miss Bala might just prove to be more detrimental than worthwhile. In it, she plays an American make-up traveling to Mexico in order to help a childhood friend with a pageant she’s trying to win. Within a few hours of arriving in Tijuana, she finds herself mixed up with the Cartel and forced to work for them in order to save her friend. What follows is an adventure filled with, what I’m sure the film thought would be plenty of twists and turns as Rodriguez soon discovers that she is the only one she can trust. Of course, that’s to be expected when you find yourself mixed up with murderous drug dealers that would sooner decapitate you than look at you.
Lately, there’s been a challenge put forth to Hollywood to hire more female directors, a move that I wholeheartedly support given what a minority they are. That being said, putting Catherine Hardwicke in charge of Miss Bala proved to be its greatest downfall. It makes about as much sense as a romantic comedy directed by Michael Bay. It’s not a reflection of her worth as a creator, but an action film is so far away from what Hardwicke has made previously that it’s easy to see her struggle with the tropes that come with the genre. Miss Bala takes place over a few days and the protagonist goes from terrified victim to stone cold killer over the course of it. Now, there are plenty of action movies where people are pushed to the breaking point and they eventually do impossible things in order to survive, but Miss Bala expects us to believe that a make-up artist is able to take out a Cartel after going to a shooting range once. Overall, it just expects too much suspension of disbelief in order to “work.”
To make matters worse, Miss Bala continuously falls into one cliched pitfall after the other. The most blatant of which is the awkward seduction/romance between Rodriguez and Ismael Cruz Cordova, who plays the Cartel leader manipulating her into his services. It’s clear he has a thing for her, but the script tries so hard to humanize this monster in order to hide the inevitable betrayal she faces at his hands. However, this is made all the worse by the films attempt to make the Cartel seem like the lesser of two evils when it comes to the War on Drugs. Rodriguez is essentially fed to the wolves by the DEA after a raid gone wrong and she’s forced to rely on her wits and sexuality in order to survive the next few days. Of course, these are just a few examples of the kind of shallow storytelling you can expect from Miss Bala. I won’t risk spoiling any more of the film for you if you so choose to see it, but rest assured the remaining twists in it are so obvious it practically ruins itself.
Now that I’ve pretty much ripped this film to pieces, I will say that there was one aspect I found myself enjoying in Miss Bala and that was the impressive casting in it. The villainous Cartel members proved to be perhaps a little too good when it came to the roles they played. I already mentioned Cruz Cordova, but more impressive even is Ricardo Abarca who plays his menacing Cartel lieutenant. Both of them prove to poses the thousand-yard stare necessary for their roles. Even Anthony Mackie manages to make an impression taking on a role that seems all too familiar after his performance as the villain in last years The Hate You Give. The problem is that all these intimidating performances only serve to demonstrate how out of place Rodriguez feels in Miss Bala. It’s not that she gives a bad performance, it’s just that standing next to them she seems more than a little out of her depth, even after her transformation.
Despite my initial first impression of Miss Bala from the trailer, I was hoping that it would prove me wrong. However, it lacks the creativity that the concept warrants. A woman who finds herself trapped by the Cartel until she can turn the tables on them seems like a movie that could be right up my alley, but even my love of mindless action movies can’t endear me to Miss Bala. Instead, it proves to me more than just mindless and evokes plenty of eye-rolling as the plot absent mindedly stumbles forward. Honestly, I can’t even say that Miss Bala is a letdown, but even despite my low expectations, I still found it disappointing.
