23-year-old Laura Guerrero lives with her father Ramón and little brother Arturo. Laura and her friend Suzu both enter the competition for the Miss Baja beauty pageant. They go tothe Millennium Night Club, where Suzu meets her boyfriend Javi. However, when Laura goes into the bathroom, she witnesses members of the La Estrella gang causing chaos by shooting and killing a number of DEA officers and nightclub-goers. Frantic, she tries to search for Suzu, and as a result fails to show up for the early rehearsal for the pageant, and is ejected from the competition. She is then kidnapped by the leader of the La Estrella gang, Lino, and the gang also kidnap her brother and father as bargaining chips to control her. Laura is used by the gang for criminal missions, including transporting drug money across the US border, and luring out a DEA agent who has infiltrated the organization. The climax of the film occurs after Laura wins the Miss Baja contest; she attempts to escape, but is recovered and later raped. The gang uses her to seduce a prominent military general ; but she switches sides when she learns that Suzu had been a casualty in the nightclub shooting. She manages to survive the ensuing shoot-out but is captured by the military, beaten, and paraded as a member of the gang. In the final scene Laura is taken away by the police and dropped off at an undisclosed location.
Miss Bala is loosely based on a real incident, in which 2008's Miss Sinaloa, Laura Zúñiga, was arrested with suspected gang members in a truck filled with munitions outside Guadalajara, Jalisco. In an interview with Complex Magazine, director Gerardo Naranjo said that he had met Zúñiga, but that "I really didn’t want to go into their psyches. I guess the film has a very strong point-of-view, and we refuse to get into the minds of these guys, because I think that’s what every other movie does… I wanted to live the experience from the point-of-view of an innocent person."
Reception
On its release at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, Miss Bala received praise from critics. On review aggregatorRotten Tomatoes the film holds an approval rating of 87% based on 69 reviews, with an average rating of 7.17/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Miss Balas subject is loaded enough, but the frantic and muscular filmmaking puts this movie in a whole new league." At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted mean rating to reviews, the film has an average score of 79 out of 100, based on 25 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
