(CNN) -- French writer-producer Luc Besson must have grown tired of watching Hollywood rehash his gal-with-a-gun actioner "Nikita," a memorably tight and efficient thriller which spawned a forgettable remake ("The Assassin," with Bridget Fonda) and might be considered the mother of recent reloads like "Salt," "Hanna," and Steven Soderbergh's forthcoming "Haywire."
In these films, women are from Mars and men are for target practice. Brutalized from infancy, these women have been bred to kill -- though their strength, athleticism and ruthless self-sufficiency rarely turns out as empowering as it first appears.
"Colombiana" (a strange title -- the word is never uttered in the movie) fits the pattern.
Although it's been released without press previews, often a sign that the studio knows it has a stinker on its hands, this pulpy English-language effort is perfectly competent, if doggedly predictable.
"Expect the unexpected," one heavy cautions a posse of bodyguards at the climax. Au contraire: There's nothing original here, even if "Avatar" alien Zoe Saldana must be the unlikeliest action hero since Adrien Brody went mano-a-mano with the Predators.
Modeling a form-hugging cat suit, she's so skinny she scarcely needs to pick the lock to get out of her jail cell -- she could probably waltz through the bars. She looks like she might break in half if you breathed on her.
But with her sad eyes and even stare, Saldana is a decent actress who showed more than willing to stick up for herself in "The Losers," and here she's been furnished with that time-honored motivational force, the murder of both parents by a ruthless Colombian drug lord.
Through a series of unlikely turns, the young Cataleya (played as a child by Amandla Stenberg) escapes their fate and gets herself from Bogota to Chicago, where Tio Emilio (Cliff Curtis) convinces her to get an education before she turns assassin-avenger. Fifteen years and twenty kills smarter, she's hoping to flush out her real target by tagging her victims with the lipstick traces of a rare orchid.
This exotic flourish apart, "Colombiana" is as focused on the job at hand as its heroine.
Directed by the self-styled Olivier Megaton ("Transporter 3"), the film has a clean, functional, unflustered look that serves it well enough. In one set piece, Cataleya feeds a Ponzi schemer to his own sharks, but it's more telling that neither the Feds nor the screenwriters bother to count the small army of bodyguards she murders to get to him among her ever-escalating tally of victims.
And just as that casual oversight seems noteworthy, it may be significant that the filmmakers scarcely bother to register that their protagonist is a woman of color. This may not be the kind of equality that Rosa Parks had in mind, but it's equality all the same, and arguably a more pertinent statement of where we're at than the pieties expressed in "The Help." Now if Viola Davis had only got her hands on a Glock ...
Seriously, though, "Colombiana" has no pretensions and no ambition other than to kick a little butt for your viewing pleasure. Besson has done more exciting work in the past but this is nothing to be ashamed of.
And full marks for playing Johnny Cash's beautiful version of "Hurt" in its entirety over the end credits, as this aching lament supplies all the pathos the movie has been lacking.
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