The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

Good girl Laura Guerro and her friend Suzu enter and qualify for the Miss Baja pageant. Laura is waiting for Suzu at a nightclub when a drug gang breaks in to kill the drug enforcement cops. She escapes from the massacre and tries to find Suzu. She seeks help from a cop but he calls in a gang who kidnaps her. The gangleader takes an interest in her and makes her compete in the pageant. He kidnaps her father and little brother pulling her further into the crime family.This is a wild crazy crime drama. This movie is nuts. One really feels for Laura. I wish she has a drug gang watchdog on her for the whole movie. She needs another person to build a relationship, have conversations and to interact with. Her character needs to show more struggle. Of course, the gang has her in complete control. The only way for her to show some spark is through some dialog with another person. That's the main thing missing here.

I was reading on the recent arrest of the Mexican drug kingpin Joaquín Guzmán Loera aka El Chapo. One of the biggest cartel bosses of Mexico, when you read the wikipedia page of this guy and you see this movie then you realize everything that's happening is actually the reality of what goes on around there.You follow a woman who decides to inscribe for a beauty contest and then becomes witness of a cartel shooting in a bar. When she falls in the hands of the cartel she becomes sort of a pawn in the 'games' they are playing. Wars between cartels, government officials, police and international criminals.Its an insane ride into the harsh reality of Mexico.

A terrifying descent into Hell. Stephanie Sigman stars as a 23 year-old woman who enters the Miss Baja California beauty pageant in her hometown of Tijuana. Apparently, the pageant is partially run by drug lords (the story is at least in part based on real-life events), and Sigman finds herself quickly sucked into a war between criminals and drug enforcement, and the latter is no more moral than the former. This film is deliberately paced, but gripping as Hell and insanely scary, scarier than any horror movie I saw this year. Sigman is excellent in the lead. Sometimes it's hard to follow, but I think that's on purpose, as the whole film is told from the point of view of Sigman, who probably isn't all that clear on what's happening to her much of the time. Director Naranjo certainly posits himself as a director to watch (I'll have to go back to see some of his previous films).

Drug-related crime in Mexico is not a unique subject for films, but no film in recent memory has confronted the issue with such force as Gerardo Naranjo's Miss Bala, a devastating look into the collusion between drug-related gangs and law enforcement. Caught in the middle is Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman), a 23-year-old unassuming woman of limited means whose dream is to enter and win the beauty pageant known as Miss Baja. Naranjo whose last film was called I'm Gonna Explode does just that, taking front and center stage in his most complete and mature work to date and Mexico's submission for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.Loosely based on actual events, right from the start we are dropped head first into the arena of the Mexican drug wars. Living at home with her father and young brother, Laura enters the competition for Miss Baja at the suggestion of her friend Suzu (Lakshmi Picazo), but she has no idea what she is getting into. Things start to go wrong almost immediately. Spending the evening with Suzu in a nightclub seems like a pleasant way to pass the evening. What she doesn't reckon with, however, is the eruption of gunfire in a hit carried out by a local cartel against agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Amidst the play of bursting bullets, Laura loses Suzu in the chaos.Seeking out a cop sitting outside in his car, she asks him for help in locating her friend. Big mistake. The corrupt cop leads her directly into the hands of a group of nameless terrorists led by local kingpin Lino Valdez (Noe Hernandez) who is in the middle of a war with Mexican and American drug enforcement agencies. After hiding out at her father's house nursing her injuries after being in the vicinity of a gun battle, Lino tells the impressionable Laura that he will help her find Suzu if she is willing to do favors for him. Forced to do the gang's bidding at the risk of losing her father and little brother and with no one to turn to for help, Laura becomes a passive and willing tool for those bent on greed and violence.Even the beauty pageant is rigged by the cartel so that Laura can be crowned as Miss Baja to the amazement of the audience and especially the more articulate and vivacious runner up. Fixing the pageant is not done out of kind feelings towards Laura but mainly to give her an audience with a high ranking general who is targeted for an assassination, even though it is murky as to who is working with whom. As Laura, Sigman elicits our empathy with her raw emotion and simple honesty. Like the Mexican people, she is powerless to prevent the brutality around her because all levels of society are complicit in its existence.Miss Bala is a powerful thriller that is not easy on the nerves but is worth sitting through if only to remind us of the depth of the problem which the director says, lies in the set of values which continue to govern our culture. According to Naranjo, "We have focused so much on the greed and getting ahead of the rest that we have lost sight of the fact that there has to be rules, and there has to be a way of doing things. Everybody is having his own battle to survive and the rules or the law don't exist, so I feel that we need a spiritual revolution." To that I can only say amen.