By John Corrado
Milla Jovovich, the star of the Resident Evil franchise, is now being given her own Liam Neeson in Taken or Sylvester Stallone in Rambo moment in Protector.
That latter comparison makes some sense since this film comes to us from director Adrian Grünberg, who previously made the 2019 legacy sequel Rambo: Last Blood. Grünberg also directed the 2012 Mel Gibson vehicle Get the Gringo, so I’m sensing a bit of a theme here.
Grünberg’s latest is a mix of trashy revenge thriller and B-movie action flick that attempts to tackle the very real topic of human trafficking. It also gender-flips a Neeson vehicle like Taken by replacing the vengeful dad with a kick-ass mom.
Jovovich stars as the ex-military Nikki Halstead, an American war hero who spent so much time being deployed, that she missed her daughter Chloe (Isabel Myers) growing up. When the 16-year-old Chloe is drugged and abducted at a bar by human traffickers, Nikki will stop at nothing to rescue her. This includes slicing and dicing her way through an underground human trafficking ring – known as “The Syndicate” – with surprising efficiency and a constantly increasing body count.
The film opens with a ripped-from-the-headlines montage of American troops being sent to the Middle East and human trafficking across the Mexican border of young women to be sold as sex slaves. The narrative gives us a 72 hour ticking clock countdown (and the first 28 or so are presented in fast-forward during a montage). We are told this is generally the amount of time that authorities have to find a missing young person before they are lost for good. It’s a bleak undertone to a film that is mainly built around cheap thrills and bone-crunching action.
Jovovich herself does a decent job in terms of the physical requirements of the action scenes, showing a grit and determination in how she approaches the bloody fights and shootouts. She’s essentially playing a Steven Seagal role and understands the assignment well enough. We also get D.B. Sweeney hamming it up as a slippery police captain trying to take down this badass momma leaving a trail of dead bodies in her wake, while Matthew Modine gives Serious Action Movie vibes as her former army colonel.
But Protector has such a second-rate Taken ripoff vibe to it that it just can’t shake. Despite some more interesting uses of security camera footage or bodycams, the whole thing has a cheap, low-rent look to it. The dialogue in writer Bong-Seob Mun’s script is often very cheesy, and there is a pretty bonkers late film revelation that tries to add some emotionality to the story, but makes so little sense in how it is executed that it borders on being flat-out ridiculous.
At just over ninety minutes, the story feels choppy and cut up, with elements of the plot and character development feeling like they were left on the cutting room floor. But this breakneck pace also means that Protector is rarely boring. So, yes, this feels like one of those direct-to-video action movies that you might’ve stumbled upon in a bargain bin at Walmart once upon a time, but I guess that could sort of be seen as a compliment, as backhanded as it may be.
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