Lip-gloss a’plenty as sexy assassin (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Lip-gloss a’plenty as sexy assassin

2:28pm Wednesday 11th January 2012 in DVD reviews By Damon Smith

Colombiana (Cert 15, 103 mins, Entertainment In Video). Starring Zoe Saldana, Michael Vartan, Jordi Molla, Lennie James, Callum Blue, Cliff Curtis, Beto Benites, Amandla Stenberg ***

In 1992 Colombia, ten-year-old Cataleya (Stenberg) witnesses the deaths of her parents at the hands of drug lord Don Luis (Benites) and his thug henchman, Marco (Molla). The girl heads to Chicago to reunite with her gangster uncle, Emilio (Curtis), determined to avenge her parents’ deaths. Fifteen years later, Cataleya (now played by Saldana) has blossomed into a sexy assassin responsible for 22 murders in four years. FBI Special Agent Ross (James) is on her trail but Cataleya will not end the killing spree until Don Luis and Marco are both six feet under. Complicating matters, the assassin is romantically involved with an artist (Vartan), who wants to know more about the enigmatic woman in his life. Colombiana is a pacy revenge thriller distinguished by a far better performance from Saldana than the film deserves. The lithe actress wrings genuine tears from her tragic heroine and seems eminently capable of taking down an entire criminal underworld between applications of lip-gloss. The romance with Vartan’s creative hunk is undernourished and James’s crusading cop is hamstrung with some terrible dialogue but both men make the most of the scraps in the formulaic yet entertaining script. The many set-pieces are littered with bone-crunching fistfights, explosions and daredevil acrobatics.

Troll Hunter (Cert 15, 99 mins, Momentum Pictures Home Entertain-ment). Starring Glenn Erland Tosterud, Tomas Alf Larsen, Johanna Morck, Otto Jespersen, Hans Morten Hansen ***

In the West, trolls are cute gift shop trinkets with voluminous hair, but in Scandinavia, these fantastical creatures are deeply embedded in folklore. Some are truly terrifying and director Andre Ovredal explores the mythology in this hugely-entertaining and action-packed thriller about a student film crew who stumble upon a secret that involves the upper echelons of power in Norway. Thomas (Tosterud), video camera man Kalle (Larsen) and sound operator Johanna (Morck) are intrigued by the deaths of several bears. Local hunters point the finger of suspicion at Hans (Jespersen), so the students stalk their prime suspect and discover that Hans is an employee of the government who risks his life to secretly deal with trolls. Unexpectedly, Hans allows the camera crew to follow him on his adventures and the youngsters stand slack-jawed as they glimpse the gargantuan creatures they thought only existed in fairy stories. In the process, the film-makers clash with Finn (Hansen), the director of the Troll Security Service, who doesn’t want footage of the beasts filtering into the mainstream. Troll Hunter is a fast-paced romp stylised as ‘found’ documentary footage, replete with blurred camerawork as Kalle and his fellow students gallop through trees and undergrowth in the dead of night to escape a rampaging creature.