Miss Bala

MISS BALA (2011) - Feb. 8, 2012
A really well made but exceptionally slow-paced and meandering film about a young woman in Mexico who finds herself an unwilling member of a Mexican drug cartel.  Though Gerardo Naranjo's directorial style -- which exclusively favours long, meticulous takes -- is kind of mesmerizing (and there are some great set-pieces here), the film itself feels a bit too thin for its own good.  Perhaps most pressingly, we hardly learn anything about the film's protagonist, who stumbles through most of the film like a zombie -- the argument could be made that she's shell-shocked, and that this is how person might really react to these events, but that doesn't make her any more of a compelling protagonist.  I was seriously stressed out while watching this movie and thus wasn't really in the right frame of mind for a film such as this, plus the IMAX theatre right below mine was causing an annoyingly incessant rumbling, so I should probably watch this again at some point.  **