(12A) 107min

After her breakthrough role as the doe-eyed alien love-interest in James Cameron’s Avatar, and as a sexed-up Uhura in JJ Abrams’s Star Trek reboot, Zoe Saldana clearly has the international profile to get almost any picture made. Almost any picture might have been better than Colombiana, another blurred photocopy of an action film from prolific producer and writer Monsieur Luc Besson.

With Olivier Megaton (Transporter 3) taking on the director’s duties with the slick anonymity expected on a Besson production, Colombiana features Saldana as Cataleya, yet another super-soldier hit-woman, biding time with assassinations while seeking clues about how to avenge her parents, whose murder she witnessed as a child in Bogota.

Working with his regular scribe Robert Mark Kamen (Taken, The Fifth Element) Besson returns to the lone female assassin trope he mined far more successfully in Nikita. Saldana’s fresh, glossy look doesn’t disguise a strictly-by-the-numbers action flick that’s too close to recent Angelina Jolie vehicle Salt. At least Jolie’s character in that film had some grit to her; as Saldana traverses shark-infested swimming pools and ventilation shafts, she just looks like a model with a big gun.

General release from Fri 9 Sep.