Tradecraft: Zoe Saldana Is Luc Besson's Next Eurospy Babe

The Hollywood Reporter's Heat Vision Blog is reporting that Zoe Saldana (Star Trek, Avatar, The Losers), one of the busiest actresses working, will star in the next neo-Eurospy movie from Luc Besson's EuropaCorp. EuropaCorp has pretty much single-handedly kept the Eurospy genre alive with such titles as the three Transporter films, Taken and From Paris With Love. Besson's next title (which has studios such as Fox and Sony throwing money at the French producer to make a multi-film deal), Columbiana, "is set in Latin America and the US," according to the trade, as opposed to the usual European locations. "Saldana would play a young woman who, after witnessing her parents' murder as a child in Bogota, grows up to be a stone-cold assassin. She works for her uncle as a hitman by day, but her personal time is spent engaging in vigilante murders that she hopes will lead her to her ultimate target: the mobster responsible for her parents' death." The script is written by Besson and Robert Mark Kamen (the same team behind Taken) and Transporter 3's improbably named helmer Olivier Megaton will direct. While all the Besson-produced neo-Eurospy movies have featured attractive women, a woman has never been the star before... which is surprising, given that so many of the films he's directed (La Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element, The Professional) have been driven by strong female leads.  Columbiana follows a trend for female spy/assassin movies right now, including Steven Soderbergh's Knockout and Joe Wright's Hanna (which was just acquired by Sony Pictures), as well as a new TV version of Besson's own La Femme Nikita.