Entertainment

An asinine assassin

Luc Besson keeps ralphing up scripts about beautiful lady killers, but that doesn’t mean you have to keep seeing them. Case in point: “Colombiana.”

Besson (“La Femme Nikita,” “The Professional”) co-wrote this dull cable-TV-quality item. A sluggish prologue that takes three times as long as it should establishes the back story of Cataleya, a little girl in Bogota who thirsts for revenge after her assassin father is killed by his own bosses and she’s obliged to flee for her life.

As an adult, Cataleya (Zoe Saldana of “Avatar”) winds up in Chicago with her uncle. The slender story line of her going after her dad’s killers then sits cold on the back burner for most of the movie. She becomes a killer for hire with a specialty in eliminating such sleazebags as a Jabba the Hutt-like villain who keeps his pet sharks in a large tank under the floor.

The action scenes, though ridiculous and building up to a grand finale in which Cataleya beats a guy senseless with a hand towel and then stabs him with a toothbrush, aren’t as painful as the clunky “romantic” interludes. And she turns reprehensible even for a hit woman when she threatens to kill an FBI agent unless he puts her in touch with a CIA man who knows the address of her father’s former gangster boss.

But for those who enjoy the prospect of watching Saldana slink around in her undies wielding a rifle roughly the size of a kayak, this is the film for you.