When the climax of your movie finds Gina Rodriguez clad in a gorgeous gown of rustling red silk while holding an AR-15, the reaction you get should be more than polite and half-hearted applause. But the American “Miss Bala” remake takes what could be an engaging story – one that was deeply harrowing in the 2011 Mexican original– and gives audiences another generic conventional, ho-hum action thriller that is only differentiated by the strong presence of its lead actress.
When American makeup artist Gloria Fuentes (Rodriguez) gets a dream gig working at L.A. Fashion Week, she’s told, “We’re not paying you to think.” But it’s her quick thinking that keeps her afloat when she travels to Tijuana to visit her friend Suzu (Cristina Rodlo). She there’s to help Suzu glam up for the Miss Baja California pageant, but she is kidnapped in the midst of an assassination attempt on the life of the police chief at a club. Her American passport makes her the ideal mule for the La Estrella cartel leader Lido (Ismael Cruz Cordova), as he sends her back and forth across the border, carrying cash and weapons between the U.S. to Mexico. Gloria is forced to do his bidding with the promise of him helping her find Suzu, who disappeared in the fray. Meanwhile, DEA agent Brian (Matt Lauria) wants her to be their woman on the inside of the La Estrella organization, but Lido’s American contact Jimmy (Anthony Mackie) tells her to warn Lido that there’s a mole hiding in his group.
Despite being caught between the DEA and the La Estrella cartel, Gloria refuses to be a victim. Everyone around her is swept up in the violence of the drug wars, including innocents like Suzu and her young brother (Sebastián Cano). As seen in the trailer, Rodriguez gets to wear that aforementioned crimson dress, holding a semi-automatic weapon and emoting courage and conviction in the heat of a firefight, and it’s at once as silly and glorious as you might imagine. “Miss Bala” then turns into what could be a feminist superhero origin story, positioning its happenings as the beginnings of what sets Gloria off into a life of badassery. You’ll either roll your eyes or pump your fists in triumph at the turn this movie takes. I nearly ended up with a detached retina from the strain.
But other than Gloria, it’s hard to find a hero on either side in this thriller. Even after she has done what she’d previously considered unthinkable to make it out alive, with Lido telling her, “Listen, Chula, sometimes you have to do terrible things to survive.” That instinct overrules all, and Gloria finds it impossible to escape this world without blood on her hands, doing what would have been unimaginable just weeks earlier in her Los Angeles life.
It doesn’t feel earned within the world the movie has created, but it (almost) works due to Rodriguez’s performance, who is carrying far more than just that AR-15 here. TV audiences know her as the warm, intelligent heroine of “Jane the Virgin,” but it was her muscular performance in last year’s “Annihilation” that showed her versatility and ability to be an action star, as well as made so many women move right on the Kinsey scale. Here, she gets to do both: the tears at Gloria’s situation flow freely (and Rodriguez cries so well, as “Jane” fans know), but there’s a power and resilience underneath that vulnerability. You want to root for her to make it out alive, and most of that is thanks to Rodriguez.
A remake of the Mexican film of the same name by director Gerardo Naranjo, this time written by filmmaker Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer and directed by Catherine Hardwicke, “Miss Bala” changes up a number of elements from its source material, beyond just the primary language of the movie. This time around, the protagonist is American, not Mexican, and she’s no longer the ambitious contestant in the pageant herself. There’s also little realism here, with each scene descending further into the realm of the ridiculous.
Hardwicke does handle the direction competently, as usual, if a bit blandly. When she’s previously worked on adaptations, namely “Twilight,” this competency has worked in sub-par material’s favor, elevating it beyond its origins. But the original “Miss Bala” was widely praised, largely for Naranjo’s helming. The issue isn’t that Hardwicke takes a different approach; it’s that there’s almost no real take on the material at all. This should be a grim thriller, but it’s more likely to elicit a shrug than a gasp and more yawning boredom than edge-of-your-seat engagement.
“Miss Bala” fails both when judged on its own merits and when compared to its predecessor. Just like Gloria in the film itself, Rodriguez is the only hero here. She works hard to elevate the material, but both she and her character deserve so much better than this. [C-]
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