Miss Bala’s biggest problem comes before the film even begins. The strange choice to promote it as some kind of female empowerment flick immediately sets the Catherine Hardwicke-directed action film up to fail, as while it’s a passable genre distraction it treats the woman at its core like an uninteresting MacGuffin to push forward an unoriginal and often problematic narrative.
Miss Bala is based on a Mexican film of the same name that was loosely inspired by a true life story about a beauty queen who was arrested alongside a gang. This version changes the original premise, introducing Gina Rodriguez’s Gloria as a makeup artist — she’s only given as much interior life as that, she does makeup as a job — who travels to Tijuana to help her friend Suzu compete in a beauty pageant. After a visit to a club to network with some powerful people involved in the contest, Gloria and Suzu are separated during a shootout and Gloria begins her bafflingly convoluted attempt to find her friend.
Source: IGN.com Miss Bala Review