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When Natalie Portman's Mathilda is saved from that music and cocaine-loving Norman Stansfield (Gary Oldman), her fate is left unknown. Old Tony (Danny Aiello) and Mathilda grieve Léon, and she is re-admitted to her school after she reveals her past to the headmaster. She tries to convince Tony to get her some cleaning work, but he ends up screaming at her, saying,
"I ain't got no work for a 12-year-old kid, so get it out of your god damn head! It's over! The game's over! Léon's dead! You hear me?"
Old Tony was hurting too.
As the film ends, Mathilda is seen planting Léon's potted plant to "give it roots". suggesting that Mathilda is ready to find her own roots in the company of Léon's plant. As for her future, we are left in the dark.
If the ending left you feeling unsatisfactory or curious, Colombiana is where you should search for answers. Natalie Portman's Mathilda, Cataleya in Colombiana, grows up to become an assassin. What began as a successor to Léon: The Professional, due to surrounding circumstances, ended up taking the shape of its own.
Zoe Saldana's Cataleya replaced Natalie Portman's Mathilda
Colombiana was released in 2011. Olivier Megaton directed it, and Luc Besson co-wrote it alongside Robert Mark Kamen. It was about a contract killer named Cataleya, whom Zoe Saldana portrays.
The interesting thing about this film is that the original script was a sequel to the 1994 cult classic Léon: The Professional, which Besson directed. In a 2011 interview with IndieWire, the Colombiana director revealed that,
"Ten years ago we decided to make ‘Mathilda,’ which was the ‘Professional’ sequel, but we couldn’t do it because of the evolution of a lot of things – about Natalie [Portman], about [estranged distributor] Gaumont. Luc tried to do this movie again and again — he proposed it to me 12 years ago. But when we decided to change the script and to make another movie with a revenge story like ‘Mathilda,’ he had to give up everything about Mathilda."
In short, Colombiana was repackaged to fit Cataleya for the film, so it feels like a completely new story with a new character, and not the grown-up version of Natalie Portman's character from Leon: The Professional. While Cataleya shares a similar essence to Mathilda, a significant difference exists in their motivations.
In what ways does Columbiana reflect Mathilda's past?
The film begins with a familiar theme: a family is gunned down, and a little girl is saved. The difference in this narrative is that the killer isn't a DEA officer popping cocaine pills, but a drug lord. Cataleya receives a memory card from her father before he dies, which is her way out of what follows after this incident takes place.
After that, we see a grown-up Cataleya, who is now a proper assassin. Though she isn't as fast as Léon was, she does a pretty good job at what she does. In the 1994 film, it was Old Tony who assigned tasks, while it is Emilio (Cliff Curtis) in Colombiana. Although he hasn't taken her in like Tony did with Léon, he is more of a family member whom Cataleya's father redirects her to stay safe with. Sadly, Emilio's family is found by the drug lord.
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