I feel guilty.
I feel guilty that the American appetite for illegal drugs has led to an obscene body-count of innocents in Mexico.
I feel guilty that women of the third world have to use their bodies to gain what should, by all rights, be available to all.
And I feel horribly guilty that I nearly fell asleep during Miss Bala.
Our hero, Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman) is in the wrong place at the wrong time. After signing up with a friend for the local Miss Baja California pageant, she finds herself at a makeshift nightclub. (I'm assuming it is a makeshift nightclub - maybe bare rooms with white plastic furniture is how they roll in Baja California.) Coming back from the ladies' room she stumbles onto a gang ambush. (Note to self - if there are American DEA agents hanging out drinking with beauty pageant contestants, duck.)
The gang lets her live, but she loses contact with her best friend in the chaos. Despite a warning not to speak a word, she contacts a police officer to help find her missing companion. And wouldn't ya know it - the cop is in on it, and takes her to the gang leader.
For a minute I thought Miss Bala was going to go the Goodfellas route and show us how an outsider is lured into the sexy world of organized crime. Alas, there's nothing sexy about it.
The disgusting mustached man keeps Laura on a leash by threatening her father and young brother. Miss Bala has the potential here to slide into a terrifying scenario - an unescapable nightmare of an innocent drowning in waters far outside of her ken. And, in theory, that's what this movie is - just done in an unusually uninteresting way.
There are moments of style in the film, however. Some of the sequences (like the highway underpass gun battle) are shot with a directness that, if nothing else, ought to wake people up in their seats. There are some moments that include long, languid takes - usually something I lap up - but unlike in other films, where this technique imbues the very screen with the characters' emotional state, here I was left wondering, "what was that for?"
Miss Bala concludes with a title card loaded with stats about the Mexican drug wars. Yet there's not much in the film that offers solutions, or even a macro point of view, to the problem. If Miss Bala works at all it is to represent the travails of someone caught in the middle, so the conclusion just kinda feels like it comes out of left field. If Miss Bala exists just to make me feel guilty, they could have gone about it a different way. If Miss Bala exists to make me care and feel about a woman in trouble, well, they could have gone about that differently, too.
