Cataleya (Amanda Stenberg) is nine years old when her father hands her a computer chip, a business card with an address, and a small medal of an orchid – the “Cataleya” – for which she is named. He tells her “Never forget where you came from.” Moments later young Cataleya’s father and mother are murdered in Colombia. And so as promised, through a series of events that begin with a yellow-screen-tinted-run-through-the-streets-like-in-Slumdog Millionaire – except this is Bogota not Mumbai – young Cataleya flees to her relatives in Chicago. On her first day of school enrollment, Catalyea informs her Uncle she wants to be a killer. It’s at this point a bit of family therapy might have been suggested. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
But instead…fast forward fifteen years later and a now grown Cataleya (Zoe Saldana) works for her uncle as a hit-woman who doesn’t know his niece is also engaging in “Tag” murders in order to infiltrate the circle of men -Don Louis (Beno Benites) and Marco (Jordi Molla) who killed her parents. And let me tell you, little Cataleya can crawl in and out of man holes, air shafts, and take on a big goon like it’s nobody’s business!
A mere sixty pounds, wet…Saldana slithers around much like she did in Avatar only this time minus the blue suit. The head of the F.B.I. (Lennie James) hopes to “Catch him” except it’s a her and he’s certain “We’re not looking for a woman.”
But enough about the plot as it’s time to focus on the filmmaker extraordinaire, who knows how to nail this genre…Luc “Femme Nikita” Besson, has just elevated this cat-suited Saldana to super stardom just as he with Milla Jovovich in The Fifth Element and Natalie Portman in The Professional. And let’s not overlook his collaborator and screenwriter Robert Mark Kamen, long admired since the first Transporter to his recent Taken. Kamen has the ongoing ability to go kickass after the jugular of evil, but somehow suspend us with damsel-in-distress edge-of-our-seat gentleness and sensitivity. A combo not easy to pull-off when you’re dealing with a killer. Three and a half tiaras