Alright so how to talk about Miss Bala. First of all let's talk about how it's a remake of a Spanish film by the same name. I don't know how I missed that for so long but it would explain why I felt like I knew this movie when I saw the first trailer and it would explain why I thought I had mandala moments regarding it. I think I've seen the trailer for the Spanish film. It doesn't change a lot of my opinion of this film (neither does my personal opinion of Ms Rodriguez).

My first thought is that when you make a remake of a film you should have something to add. And I left the movie theatre thinking they didn't really add anything. Again it's important to note that I haven't seen the original. It just felt like there was something missing in the movie.

But that said it's a very entertaining movie. There's the always laughable scene where a girl and her hot friend go to a beauty pageant and the hot friend is told "you clearly aren't going to be entering... are you?". It's a compelling setup. There are just areas where the narrative feels unexplored. After Miss Congeniality it's hard for me to see a beauty pageant as something that doesn't take weeks of time to even fake it. Even though it's such a small part of the story it feels like it could have been more. Which is such a shame because what is there is so compelling. Gloria is a great character I kinda wanted more intrigue from her the trailer seemed to hint that she would play both sides against each other. That she would be a double or triple agent for ICE/FBI/CIA whatever. But it's so simplified. What i expected to just be the first strokes to making the twisted alliance ended up being the straight forward whole movie. I expected her to be doing whatever it took not because she couldn't get out but because she couldn't leave behind her friend. Instead [spoiler]her friend is missing for the whole movies. I thought at one point she might be dead and another girl would be the girl she 'couldn't leave behind' but that didn't pan out that way either[/spoiler].

I have other small nitpicks like it felt like there wasn't enough spanish oddly enough. There's a scene where she has to remove something from a phone. But the phone is in a container of 10 identical phones. [spoiler]Instead of remove it she moves it. Which was interesting. Except she had to dig through three phones just to find the correct one. After which she dug through the bag looking for a phone before putting it in one. But .. why dig? They're all identical? And why bother putting it back? I sorta linked back to the "mole" BUUUT. There was a 1 in 10 chance she puts it in HER phone. What then? It's not like she could tell which phone was hers and she avoided that one. It was just a weird scene that was tense enough but didn't make sense.[/spoiler]