Review: Gina Rodriguez shines in the gritty but messy ‘Miss Bala’

Miss Bala arrives in theatres at a difficult time. With the volatile political situation between the US and Mexico, a story of a young American woman — Gina Rodriguez, in a major departure from her role on Jane The Virgin — who is kidnapped by Mexican cartel members and forced into service in a deadly drug ring, seems to bolster the idea that Mexico is a very dangerous place that Americans need to be protected from.

A remake of a popular 2011 Mexican film of the same name, the original is based on the true story of Laura Zúñiga, a beauty pageant contestant in Mexico who was arrested with a carful of weapons, cash, and cartel members. This remake takes a few liberties from the original (including placing much of the action in the US), and mostly manages to avoid the sort of Sicario-lite pitfalls that the trailers hinted at.

Instead of a Mexican beauty queen, in this version Rodriguez plays Gloria Meyer, a low-level makeup artist working in LA who still gets a thrill from stealing makeup sample bags from backstage at the events she works. While in Mexico to help her childhood friend prep for her entry in a local beauty pageant, Gloria witnesses a number of cartel members sneak into a nightclub moments before a mass shooting. She loses track of her friend in the chaos, and through a series of well-intentioned blunders ends up in the hands of a ruthless cartel boss named Lino (Ismael Cruz Cordova), who promises to help Gloria track down her missing friend if she agrees to assist Lino’s crew in smuggling drugs across the border to the US.

That tacit “agreement” is really at the heart of Miss Bala, which does a fairly convincing job of portraying a terrified young woman stuck between terrible choices at every end. If she doesn’t cooperate with Lino, Gloria and her friend will be killed, and as she quickly learns, the local DEA agents aren’t sympathetic to her plight either — they believe she is a willing accomplice to the horrors perpetrated by Lino’s cartel, and blackmail her into spying on Lino for the feds, further pushing her into extremely dangerous situations.

It would be easy for Miss Bala to be a crowd-pleasing action flick about a young, powerful woman taking on the Mexican cartels at their own game, a sort of south of the border version of Kill Bill, but director Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen, the first Twilight) makes this a much darker look at the violent world of the drug trade and the rampant corruption that allows it to flourish. Hardwicke keeps the action moving along briskly, and has a real feel for building suspense, resulting in the sort of drawn-out, tense scenes that make you want to yell out warnings at the screen (as an elderly couple behind me so helpfully did at my screening).

Those suspenseful scenes are bolstered my Rodriguez’s restrained performance. She conveys so much here with just her clenched teeth and determined face, and does a solid job of conveying an ordinary girl thrust into an impossibly dangerous situation, with all the resulting shell-shock of someone faced with something so unimaginable. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the cast feels like a casting agent simply applied a Narcos Instagram filter, creating a group of very attractive young actors who never seem to carry the sort of gravitas that their characters should embody.

Ismael Cruz Cordova has a steely cool look as the cartel boss keeping Gina prisoner, but never manages to be convincing as a terrifying drug lord who kills at will (even when we see him doing that very thing). The pair have no chemistry, but then again this isn’t a rom-com — Gloria is a prisoner, and apart from a few moments of uncertainty early on that hint at a change of allegiances, she remains steadfast in her desire to escape from Lino’s crutches. Far more cringeworthy than Cordova’s removed performance is the DEA agent Gina is forced to work with (Matt Lauria), a character that seems a solid 15 years too young to be playing the part of a federal agent orchestrating the takedown of a Mexican drug cartel.

Miss Bala throws a whole TV season’s worth of plot into its tidy 104-minute running time, and stats to really feel rushed as the film speeds towards its climax. The crucial pageant scene near the end (which could have formed the backbone for almost any other movie) goes by in the blink of an eye, but the film manages to pump its breaks in the final moments to deliver a cathartic face-off that truly feels earned. After all we’ve seen Gloria go through, you can’t help but cheer when the tables are finally turned, even if the execution is a little sloppy.

With a 95 % Latinx cast and crew, Miss Bala deserves credit simply in terms of representation. Rodriguez delivers a riveting performance that clearly shows she has a range far beyond her comic stylings on Jane The Virgin, even if the rest of the cast falls a bit flat. Catherine Hardwicke has crafted a gritty little thriller that may not be the all-out blockbuster that makes Rodriguez a movie star, but there are definitely worse ways to kill some time at the theatre during the slowest month of the year. 

Miss Bala is in theatres January 31.