Gina Rodriguez Thriller ‘Miss Bala’ is a generic Hollywood remake
In “Miss Bala,” a disappointingly bland genre exercise directed by Catherine Hardwicke (“Twilight,” “Thirteen”), a Los Angeles makeup artist heads to Tijuana, Mexico, to help her best friend enter a local beauty pageant. Big mistake.
Amid a hail of bullets and a string of explosions, our innocent heroine is repeatedly abducted, exploited, threatened and terrorized by murderous drug-cartel operatives and duplicitous narcs, becoming the pawn of a system where criminality is the law of the land.
It sounds like it should be better, and in fact, it already has been. A Hollywood revamp of a superior, same-titled 2012 thriller by the Mexican auteur Gerardo Naranjo, “Miss Bala” cleaves to that earlier picture in certain key story particulars. But nearly everything else that made Naranj...
