“Miss Bala” — or “Miss Bullet,” as they say on Google Translate — is a real surprise. It seems to promise an exploitative genre movie, about gangsters and drug deals, and it delivers on that, but it’s something more. Director Catherine Hardwicke and screenwriter Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer have taken a Mexican thriller, with a female victim at its center, and have turned it into an intelligent feminist film.

The intelligence is as important as the feminism.

It’s common in movies for the most misogynist fantasies of the male imagination to be fobbed off in the publicity as “strong, feminist statements,” so long as they show a woman, any woman, demonstrating strength, even if it’s strength in the service of evil, cruelty or self-destruction. But this is Hardwicke, who has made terrific movies, such as “The Nativity Story” and “Thirteen.” She knows exactly what she’s doing, and she knows what she’s using the movie to say.

Gloria (Gina Rodriguez, “Jane the Virgin,” who couldn’t be better here) is a normal American woman, a makeup artist, originally from Tijuana. She crosses the border and goes back to the city of her birth to visit an old friend, Suzu (Cristina Rodlo), who is preparing to enter the Miss Baja (as in Baja California) beauty pageant.

In these early scenes, Gloria is the more diffident of the two women, and Suzu is the more outgoing, more at home in her world and in control of her environment. Then the two go to a nightclub and end up separated, when gang members break in and start spraying the place with bullets. They seem to be trying to assassinate one person in particular, but they’re not big on subtlety, and it turns into a scene of absolute chaos.

It’s the first of at least three big action sequences, and Hardwicke establishes the pattern here by staying almost entirely with Gloria and her perspective. In a sense, Hardwicke has us become her, and so we develop a deep and serious interest in Gloria’s survival.

It would be critically reckless to say anything more about a story that figures out new surprises to spring on us every 10 minutes. (But some critics may be reckless, so don’t read any more reviews if you plan on seeing this movie.) Based on the synopsis of the original Mexican film — I haven’t seen it — the American remake has come up with a series of new and inventive turns, while staying focused on its larger project of presenting the action as one woman’s education.

At the center of the film is the complicated dynamic that develops between Gloria and Lino (Ismael Cruz Cordova), a young gangland honcho with a small, vicious crew. As played by Cordova, Lino is charismatic and rational. He might be redeemable, or he might just be exhibiting residual traces of having once been a human being. At one point, Gloria finds herself at his mercy, forced to do his bidding, and, for a brutal guy, he’s nicer than he has to be.

There’s something in their interaction and the questions arising from it that extends beyond these two individuals and seems part of a larger point that Hardwicke is making. The dynamic is too rich to lend itself to easy characterization or to boil down to a single message, but it seems to be in the nature of a warning about this kind of fellow. Lino is not just charming, but vulnerable. He likes her. He sees something in her. Yet we sometimes wonder if any of that even matters.

For an obvious movie in an obvious genre, “Miss Bala” has a light touch. Thus, Rodriguez’s transformation, though notable and satisfying, takes place onscreen in the way such things happen in life, not action movies. The change is acted by the actress, not imposed on her. And though the change isn’t big, it feels huge, because it’s real.

M“Miss Bala”: Action drama. Starring Gina Rodriguez and Ismael Cruz Cordova. Directed by Catherine Hardwicke. (PG-13. 104 minutes.)