Billboard For Female Assassin Flick Riles Englewood Activists
CHICAGO (CBS) -- An Englewood neighborhood billboard for a new shoot-'em-up action movie is stirring an outcry.
The movie, which opened Friday, is called "Colombiana" and stars Zoe Saldana of "Avatar" fame in a violent story of a female assassin.
CBS2's Mike Parker explains why community leaders are upset and want the billboard removed.
Southside Pastor Franklin Morris of the New Mount Calvary Baptist Church first noticed the billboard at 67th and Ashland last week.
"I am passing by and I said 'That couldn't really have said what I thought it said.'"
But it did. The marketing hook "Revenge is Beautiful" is displayed alongside a picture of Saldana holding a gun.
Clergy and community leaders are enraged that the message about revenge is there in the midst of the Englewood neighborhood, where gun violence is a fact of everyday life.
"We don't want to romanticize this because there are victims on the other side of a smoking gun," Rev. Titus Lee of the South Side Tabernacle Church says.
A local anti-violence activist, Andrew Holmes, blames the movie-makers. "How many of them are billionaires and millionaires and bury kids the way we are burying kids over here in Englewood?" he says.
The film "Colombiana" raked in $10 million over the weekend.
CBS2 reached out to the billboard company for comment. Clear Channel Outdoor Advertising's office in Chicago did not return calls; nor did corporate headquarters in Arizona.
