Read the Netflix capsule description and you might think this is a slam-bang erotic thriller about a sleek lady assassin, but NOPE. It’s more a character study of a doomed soul.
The sexy stuff is there for awhile, sure. The pants-wettingly hot Flora Martinez is the title character and just the way she walks up stairs can make a man need a tissue box and about ten minutes of privacy. Director Emilio Maillé shows off her perfect lips, eyes and proportions a lot. Gradually though, as the movie snaps back and forth through time, contrasting its 1989 dance club and sparkling night lights with a dreary hospital where Rosario lies shot and bloody and barely alive, it all becomes bleak.
Her sadness becomes more important than her skin. Her nude scenes turn painfully vulnerable. She’s been used, raped, betrayed and kicked around by men for her entire life. When she starts killing, it’s neither a feminist triumph nor sleazy Ms. 45-style fun (her first kill is an innocent—and an accident). And it’s not working. It’s not healing her. You get the sense that part of her motivation is that she wants someone to eventually kill her right back.
Death, after all, is not the end in this story’s Catholic world (specifically the slums of Medellin, Columbia). Next to gunplay and sex, Rosario’s other pastime is decorating friends’ graves so that they’ll know she still cares. When someone she loves dies, she takes his corpse out for one last night on the town. When someone who hurt her dies, she crashes the funeral to shoot his dead body even more dead. Those are among the best parts of a movie that isn’t all that great. Martinez is a perfect broken beauty in the lead role, but not many of the other characters have a steady pulse.
In the end, director Maillé can’t get his sleaze and his substance to complement each other. It’s stiff and uncomfortable. Nevertheless, it was a huge domestic hit in Columbia. Look for Alex Cox (director of Repo Man and Sid & Nancy, as well as an enthusiast for Mexican/South American films) in a brief acting role as a gringo gangster who’s just another creep in Rosario’s past.