Joel on Film

A shockingly inept action-thriller, Protector doesn’t even succeed at giving us the satisfaction of watching Milla Jovovich lay waste to a major sex trafficker and his many minions. One has to believe it takes quite a lack of ability to fail to achieve even that minor thrill, but it also might rank somewhere near the bottom of this film’s many, many problems. This is a critically silly movie, in ways that stretch far beyond wobbly internal logic or even the bizarrely ineffectual performance from its star, who is saddled with the type of gimmicky narration that gives the storytelling choice a bad name.

In fact, the framing device is a simple close-up of Jovovich’s Nikki Halstead dictating directly to the camera a mixture of the facts of her search for her kidnapped child and the philosophy that forms her world view after experiencing years of war. The actress has two modes throughout here: sober somberness and crazed desperation, both of which struggle to make anything of a character who is basically just a vessel for bloody, violent revenge (or justice, depending upon which side you take in the simple debate that arises between a couple of other characters for the duration of a single conversation). Jovovich is usually good at performances like this, so maybe we can just chalk it up to the material.

That material is utterly threadbare, picking up with Nikki and her daughter Chloe (Isabel Myers), who had to live her childhood with a military mom away from the home in some far off country and a dad who died too young from leukemia. The daughter wants her time away from mom, though, just to celebrate her own birthday, and seemingly as punishment for that, the movie concocts for her to be abducted from a restaurant by an apparently nice guy. She’ll be delivered into the hands of the elusive Sullivan (Don Harvey), who answers to the even-more-elusive “Chairman” (Gabriel Sloyer).

These are not interesting villains in the slightest, as one might expect, but one might not be anticipating just how dull they are in comparison to the heroine of the piece, who herself is fairly one-note. The main reason for their existence here is to be on the other end of Nikki’s startlingly efficient search-and-rescue mission, in which she mows down—sometimes extrajudicially—every last man and frees every captive girl or woman in the bad guys’ nondescript lair. Director Adrian Grunberg at least incorporates a sense of jarring momentum in these scenes, though they’re only jarring because the rest of the film is so sluggish and tedious.

Meanwhile, the screenplay by Bong Seob Mun gives us a major subplot that is entirely an excuse for two layers of exposition. The first comes from an investigative unit led by D.B. Sweeney’s Capt. Michaels, who tirelessly follows the trail and leaves his subordinates (played by Michael Stahl-David, Lydia Hull and Texas Battle) to do the field work. The second arrives in the form of Matthew Modine, as a colonel who has a shared history with Nikki that should almost certainly remain out of this review for pretty good reasons that must be seen to be believed.

Let’s just say that it involves the Big Twist at the end of the game Protector is playing with us, and do not underestimate just how much of a game literally everything is here. The truth of it pulls the weight out from under this plot with no possible recourse or, because it arrives at the last possible second, time to deal with the ramifications, to explore what the implications might mean, or to register the twist as anything but a big, dumb mistake in just about every possible way.

Rating: * (out of ****)