After years in physically demanding action movies, Milla Jovovich shows little sign of slowing down. In a genre usually reserved for male action stars like Jason Statham and Gerard Butler, Jovovich continues to put the time, energy, and intensity into carving out a place of her own. Some entries are better (“Resident Evil”) than others, which brings us to one of the least entertaining titles in her resume, a low-rent “Taken” knock-off called “Protector.” The movie follows “Taken” so closely that “Protector” even extends its 96-hour deadline, stating that a rescue must be completed within 72 hours, or the missing child will likely not be found alive. Mixing choppy action sequences with this off-putting plot about sex trafficking, there is little to enjoy about Adrian Grünberg’s latest effort. Even Jovovich is hard-pressed to pull off this assignment.
Like Liam Neeson in “Taken,” Jovovich’s Nikki has a “particular set of skills” that prepares her for the grim mission ahead. After years away serving on the frontlines of the U.S. Army, Nikki must come home to a dying husband and her grief-stricken daughter. Life goes on, but she struggles settling into the domestic role of a teen girl’s mom–that is, until her daughter Chloe (Isabel Myers) is kidnapped by a sex trafficking syndicate (cleverly named “The Syndicate,” but do try to remember that). As she leaves a trail of dead villains in her wake, law enforcement wants her stopped, but only Nikki’s former commanding officer Colonel Lavelle (Matthew Modine) can bring her bloody search for vengeance against The Syndicate to an end.
Grünberg is no stranger to action movies after breaking out with “Get the Gringo” and later directing “Rambo: Last Blood.” But “Protector” shows little knowledge of framing movement and editing. The entire movie feels choppy, especially in fight scenes that lack rhythm or don’t quite start when they should. Best I can say it looks like a rookie’s first attempt at shooting fight choreography, adding in extra zooms to amp up the intensity (and the messiness). Other times, scenes look too dark to tell exactly what’s going on. The movie is a structural and visual mess from stem to stern, starting with a montage of Nikki’s military career at odds with her family life back home that’s overlaid with headlines about sex trafficking, just so the viewer knows where this movie is headed. I don’t know what Grünberg and cinematographer Vern Nobles Jr. had in mind for how “Protector” should look, but this so missed the mark even among other action-driven contemporaries.
If the lack of visual style wasn’t enough to turn you off, the script written by Bong-Seob Mun should finish the job. Full of tepid exchanges like “A woman did all this?” to which a female officer responds, “Does that surprise you?,” “Protector” is a slog to endure. Jovovich struggles to make any part of Nikki believable, including the movie’s voiceover narration that doubles as her inner monologue. “In the service, we’d call it a kill box,” she says before another wave of eliminating sex traffickers. “It’s a box and well, you get the picture.” No, please continue spelling it out. The script’s deadpan narration seems to have been written for a film noir hero doomed to die, but it only adds to the dead weight in-between fight scenes. In one scene when Nikki is facing off against a knife-wielding captor in a slaughterhouse, he tells her how she killed an earlier character, which on one hand feels redundant if she was already there doing the murder and on the other, feels like the filmmakers didn’t bother shooting the scene so it has to be told not shown.
Jovovich’s signature scowl serves its purpose as she wastes creep after creep, acting almost like a Terminator in her ability to escape traps and inflict maximum pain to find out where her daughter was taken. But even as she kicks into high gear for formidable stunts, her performance doesn’t move from playing it seriously for much of the movie, leaving her with not much else to work with. Dragged down by over-explanatory dialogue and tired narrative tropes, “Protector” brings nothing new to the table–except maybe for a confounding 11th hour twist that I won’t spoil that defies reasoning and frankly, good taste. If anyone needs rescuing, it’s Jovovich from this movie.
