Gina Rodriguez Kicks Butt And Takes Nombres In 'Miss Bala'
Liam Neeson is 66 years old, but someday he will be dead, and reluctant-hero midwinter action flicks will need a new standard-bearer. Miss Bala — director Catherine Hardwicke's efficient PG-13 remake of an R-rated Mexican thriller from 2011, also called Miss Bala — pleads the case that Gina Rodriguez, whom we saw handle a rifle in Annihilation just last year, has all the qualifications for the job if she wants it.
Given that the trailer features a shot of her wearing a tight red evening dress and a resolute expression as she strides through flaming carnage while armed, the temptation to call this thing G.I. Jane the Virgin is strong. But like last year's criminally underseen Widows — a more richly layered and thoughtful film than this one, to be sure — Miss Bala invites us to take vicarious pleasure not in violence for its own sake, but in seeing women (one woman, this time) who've been pushed around by bad men find the strength to make it stop.
Rodriguez plays Gloria, a Los Angelino visiting Tijuana to see her lifelong friend Suzu compete in the Miss Baja California Pageant. Unlucky bystanders in a nightclub shootout, the pair are separated in the terror and confusion; as soon as Gloria decides to walk up to a cop and declare herself an eyewitness, she's abducted and brought to the gangster responsible.
This purring, doe-eyed kingpin (Ismael Cruz Córdova) promises to help Gloria locate her bestie if she dances to his evil tune — and kill both women if she doesn't. It's one of those offers you can't refuse! Before you can say Sicario — a more absorbing and unpredictable lady-headlined border-hopscotching crime picture than this one, to be sure — Gloria has become a non-consenting smuggler, gun runner, and saboteur. And that's before she's even met the real bastards: the ones with DEA badges.
Resourceful and athletic without ever becoming superhuman, Rodriguez is easy to root for. The movie relies on her innate charisma as a performer to cover up that it's an underwritten part. We don't get those flashes of pure character work that made Sandra Oh so compelling in the TV series Killing Eve — a more original international conspiracy mystery than this one, to be sure.
Anyway, Hardwicke gives Rodriguez a worthy foil in Córdova as Lino, the captor and blackmailer who keeps trying to gaslight Gloria into thinking she's his guest. Córdova is a Sesame Street cast member, among his other credits, and with those dewy baby blues of his he could Terrence Howard's son.
Lino is a predator, plopping down on a bed beside Gloria and softly commanding her — while holding a handgun idly, it it's possible to hold a deadly weapon idly — to remove his boots, then to undress herself. In more public environments, he reminds Gloria of her servitude by tracing a lecherous finger along her collarbone. Making her an unwitting assassin and threatening her with and her best friend with murder is one thing — well, those are two or three things, technically — but that collarbone business is skeevy.
And yet! There's a palpable spark between Rodriguez and Córdova that gives their scenes together an emotional complexity present nowhere else in the film. The chemistry between these two actors is strong enough that the decision to make Lino so unambiguously a bad dude is a serious error. It prevents the relationship developing between him and Gloria from ever becoming as intriguingly murky as, say, the one between Jennifer Lawrence and Joel Edgerton's characters in Red Sparrow — a more disorienting who's-playing-whodunit than this one, to be sure.
Hardwicke shot most of Miss Bala on location in Tijuana, and she does a good job of soaking up the flavor of the city. She's better at conjuring suspense then she is at capturing the obligatory gun battles; there are three of them, and only one, staged in a vacant stadium, sustains our interest by forcing the characters to make story-altering choices while stuff is blowing up. Elsewhere, Hardwicke finds smart variations on familiar scenes: We've all seen movies and TV shows where someone has thick bands of cash wrapped around their torso with tape, but this was the first to make me think for a moment about how uncomfortable that must be, especially sitting in traffic, roasting on the asphalt, nerves jangling while you await your 15-second interview with a customs agent who could lock you up for years.
Anthony Mackie has never needed much real estate to make a big impression, but his presence in the movie in three scenes totaling less than five minutes' screen time is a mystery. Maybe Falcon-of-The-Avengers just wanted to led his support to a woman-starring thriller directed by the woman who had a massive hit in Twilight a decade ago, only to see all four of its more generously budgeted follow-ups assigned to male filmmakers. Miss Bala's press materials proclaim it had "a cast and crew that was 95 percent Latinx," and that the film "will have particular appeal to the underserved Latinx audience – the industry's most loyal and fastest-growing demographic."
The movie Hardwicke and Rodriguez have delivered is a bigger step forward for representation than it is for genre filmmaking; more Jackie Robinson than Jackie Brown — a funnier and more closely observed caper film about a woman of color trapped between the crooks and the cops, to be sure. But Rodriguez and Córdova are compelling enough to command our attention.
To be sure.
his by-the-book Hollywood remake of the 2011 Mexican art-house movie transforms a passive victim into a new kind of empowered action heroine.
CREDIT: SONY
Of course a movie like “Miss Bala” would have caught Hollywood’s attention. Launched at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011, it took a completely unconventional approach to the tense, high-impact story of a Mexican beauty-pageant contestant who witnesses a terrifying public shooting, goes to the (dirty) cops to report it, and promptly gets handed over to the cartel thugs behind the attack. Instead of sensationalizing the action, director Gerardo Naranjo made it exponentially more impactful by plunging an innocent woman into this out-of-control situation, letting realistic scenes of violence play out at a distance, often in a single shot.
Now, if you want to see exactly the kind of movie “Miss Bala” seemed to be reacting against — one that transforms a victim into a kind of undercover vigilante, and surrounds her with flashy camera moves and explosive set-pieces — look no farther than Sony’s big-budget, PG-13-rated remake, directed for maximum excitement/empowerment by “Twilight” helmer Catherine Hardwicke. In theory, that’s what most audiences probably hoped to get from “Miss Bala” in the first place, and Naranjo knew what he was doing by denying them that.
The studio version of “Miss Bala” substitutes Gina Rodriguezas Gloria, an American-born tough gal (far different from the “Jane the Virgin” character she plays on TV), putting her through many of the same hurdles, just to set up the money shot where she struts down a driveway in a red evening dress brandishing an assault rifle. It’s thrilling to see a woman looking confident and defending herself as all hell breaks loose around her, but it’s a direct contradiction of what the original film stood for. “Miss Bala” no longer serves as a critique of a system that might allow innocent people to get caught in the crossfire of the drug war, but as the kick-ass origin story for a new kind of action hero.
Most audiences won’t know or care that this is a remake, however, which means Hardwicke’s approach is pretty much how the Hollywood version had to go down. If you’re open to an American movie that dares to challenge the formula — brutal, cynical, and upsetting in the way its ostensible protagonist discovers she’s a passive pawn in a much larger story — you’d be better off checking out “Sicario.” Ironically, even though it hails from the same studio, Sony doesn’t dare take that approach with “Miss Bala.”
Instead, screenwriter Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer has dashed off what feels like back-to-back episodes of a show like “24,” piling up one nail-biting situation after another in which Gloria must rely on her wits to stay alive. For some reason — probably because she’s no longer Mexican but Mexican-American — the character isn’t actually a participant in the Mill Baja beauty pageant, merely visiting her friend Suzu (Cristina Rodlo) south of the border.
Early scenes in the U.S. establish how hard it is for a woman to get respect (a nice touch), positioning Rodriguez like a young Jennifer Lopez: an exceptionally beautiful Latinx heroine whom we’re meant to read as a relatable Everywoman — in this case, one who gets teased for sounding too white when she speaks Spanish (she’s labeled a “pocha”) and who thinks herself so plain that she wouldn’t even consider competing for the Miss Baja title. In short order, it will be revealed that the contest is a rigged affair anyway, where the winner is expected to sleep with a corrupt local general. Gloria and Suzu are partying in a posh nightclub when a gang of heavily armed cartel hit men shoot up the place and kidnap Suzu.
Gloria thinks she’s doing the right thing by going to the cops, though the officer she confides in works for the cartel, delivering her to the same men she witnessed at the club the night before — which just goes to show how naive she is when the story begins. She’s in so far over her head that it doesn’t occur to her until too late that she’s being used to do the cartel’s dirty work when, following orders, she parks a car full of explosives in front of a house full of DEA agents. Next, they force her to drive back across the border with drug money taped to her body. But Gloria has one hell of a character arc ahead of her, and the movie multitasks between inviting audiences to wonder “What would you do?” and presenting her as a strong and resourceful woman trapped in an impossible situation.
Perhaps most humiliating for someone so independent, she’s obliged to use her sex appeal to manipulate Lino (the green-eyed, wolf-like leader of the gang) into falling for her, and even though becoming one of the gangster’s girlfriends isn’t a foolproof strategy for survival, it seems likely to buy her a measure of protection. Still, it’s a dangerous ploy, considering that DEA agents — who find a way to get through to Gloria when she’s alone — can never really trust whether she’s innocent or in fact Lino’s gal. After these authorities blackmail Gloria into giving them the location of Lino’s next rendezvous, they stage an ambush that makes it quite clear to her that she’s on her own.
Inspired by an actual case where Miss Sinaloa, Laura Zúñiga, was arrested in a drug-running scheme, that’s basically the feeling Naranjo left audiences with at the end of the original “Miss Bala” — the idea that she could never go back to the life she’d had, and whether in the hands of the cops or the cartel, her life was as good as over. In Hardwicke’s version, that sense of unfairness surfaces earlier, allowing Gloria to take a more active role in trying to find a solution that will restore some sense of agency. Naturally, that makes for a more satisfying adventure, even if many of the resulting sequences feel so … conventional.
Watching Rodriguez (whose breakout role was in the 2012 Sundance discovery “Filly Brown”), audiences can sense the emergence of a charismatic new star. That dynamic may as well be a complete reversal of the original film, in which a young woman is overwhelmed and effectively destroyed by the corruption around her. But Hollywood craves a happy ending nearly as much as audiences now want to see women succeed in a system that’s stacked against them. This mostly-English-language version of “Miss Bala” does with a shotgun blast what Naranjo did with a sniper round. It may not be an improvement on the original Mexican movie, but it’s sure to reach a lot more people.
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