Gloria finds a power she never knew she had when she is drawn into a dangerous world of cross-border crime. Surviving will require all of her cunning, inventiveness, and strength. Based on the Spanish-language film.
I had no idea this was based on a 2011 Spanish-language film. I never saw the original and besides the trailer, I decided not to read up on this title. Sometimes, you can enjoy a movie more if you know little to nothing about it in advance but in today’s fast-paced, shove-everything-in-your-face society, that’s not always feasible. Surprisingly, I only watched the trailer once and while the movie overall, was enjoyable, it was conventional and employed very little in the way of originality. Gina Rodriguez owns this film and while there’s not much else to praise, her performance is more than enough.
Here she plays Gloria, a young woman who works as a make-up artist in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles. After a big fashion show, she heads south of the border to Tijuana to help her friend Suzu (Cristina Rodlo), an aspiring model who is preparing to enter the Miss Baja beauty pageant. After signing up, the two women head out for a night on the town at a trendy nightclub but when armed men from one of the local cartels enter the facility and start shooting the place up, both Gloria and Suzu get separated in the commotion and Gloria manages to make her way outside and enters a small cafe across the road. Trying desperately to contact Suzu, she constantly receives her voicemail. Hiding in the cafe in the hopes that the armed men won’t spot her, she eventually falls asleep and when she wakes up the next morning, she goes outside and approaches a police officer. Informing him that her friend has been missing since the night before in the shootout, when she tells him that she can identify the men, he has her get into his patrol car, stating that he wants to take her to the police station to take her statement but he winds up being a crooked cop who works for the cartel and turns her over to them.
From here, their leader, Lino (Ismael Cruz Cordova), informs her that she is to do whatever he says or he will kill her. With no choice but to do what he says, she finds herself getting deeper and deeper into trouble with the cartel and while out on a mission for them, she is captured by the DEA and told that she either works for them or that they will inform the cartel that she is a snitch. Stuck between two impossible scenarios, Gloria begins to work both sides against each other and while forced to stay with Lino, he takes a liking to her and starts training her in gun combat, teaching her how to take care of herself. When a chance arises for her to try and save her friend Suzu from a human-trafficking ring run by the local crooked police, she seizes the opportunity, begging Lino to help her out, promising that she will do anything in return. He obliges her but when they get to the destination and she locates Suzu, she quickly turns on him and uses everything he taught her against him, in a fight to the death.
“Miss Bala” reflects many of today’s hot topics involving Mexico, including the cartels, drug and gun-running, and human trafficking. While the movie incorporates these issues, they are used primarily as background noise and serve only as a reminder of the danger that Gloria is surrounded by. I hoped, as the film progressed, that Ms. Rodriguez would not transform into a Sarah Connor-type action figure by movie’s end, unbelievably metamorphosing from mild-mannered make-up artist into a tough-as-nails killing machine, slaughtering every single bad guy in sight. Thankfully, director Catherine Hardwicke had enough sense to not go down that road and while Ms. Rodriguez does indeed learn how to take care of herself, her final transformation is made believable only because of her unyielding determination to live and to save her best friend. There are a few action scenes but they are relegated to clichéd shootouts and unexceptional explosions, done better in other movies. As the final credits roll, we are left with the possibility that Gloria could return and while that thought is an intriguing one, the story would have to be much more involving, and not just scratch the surface of one that could have been so much better.
In theaters Friday, February 1st
