Miss Bala

Miss Bala—a ripped-from-the-headlines potboiler about a Mexican-American beauty pageant contestant caught between a Tijuana cartel and the DEA officials sworn to take it down—couldn’t have landed at a better time: to fan the flames of anti-immigrant fury engulfing that part of the U.S., to squat and drop some both-sides fertilizer on that horror show, to transform the terrifying reality of the U.S.’s current chauvinistic foreign policy into the stuff of a Lifetime Original movie, to prove just how hollow and tone-deaf most of Hollywood has a tendency to be, to make the CIA look cool by having an Avenger cameo as an agent in its closing minutes. Miss Bala is wretched, directed by Catherine Hardwicke like a late-’90s music video and written by Gareth Dunnett-Alcocer as a shoddy soap opera, but what truly makes it a harmful wide release in January 2019 is just how sloppily it shits all over any sense of nuance at a time, during a cultural moment, in which nuance is essential.
Gina Rodriguez plays Gloria Meyer, a mid-level LA makeup artist who travels to Tijuana to visit Suzu (Cristina Rodlo) to shepherd her best friend through the Miss Baja beauty pageant. Gloria peppers every conversation with dismay at her cross-cultural heritage, feeling as if she belongs neither in Los Angeles nor in Tijuana, forever an outsider. Rather than explore such alienation, we’re rushed to a nightclub, where Gloria and Suzu are inadvertently caught in the middle of an assassination attempt on Chief Saucedo (Damián Alcázar), local law enforcement official and Trump-like pageant figurehead. Suzu disappears in the fray, and Gloria’s kidnapped by the cartel behind the failed murder, told by hunky leader Lino (Ismael Cruz Cordova) that if she cooperates with their nefarious doings, they’ll help her find Suzu. No sooner does Gloria escape into the clutches of the DEA, led by whitebred Agent Brian (Matt Lauria), who demonstrates such hilarious disdain for Gloria and her wellbeing that we know he won’t be long for this world. (Spoiler: He’s blown up by a grenade launcher, which is more exciting to think about than witness.) The DEA forces Gloria to be their mole inside Lino’s cartel in exchange for passage back to the U.S. and help with securing Suzu’s safety, wherever she is.