Protector

by Mike McGranaghan

If I had the power to abolish an overused cinematic cliché, it would be the one about an ex-Special Forces soldier who becomes an unstoppable killing machine when somebody messes with their family. Milla Jovovich plays such a figure in Protector. You know what that means. A single punch from her character can knock a guy out cold, but she can have her stomach sliced open and still carry on like it’s no big deal. No bullet can touch her, but she never misses a shot. This tiresome trope is only the first of the movie’s many missteps.

Jovovich plays war hero Nikki, now back in the U.S. where she’s a single mom to teenage Chloe (Isabel Myers). On her 16th birthday, Chloe sneaks out to a bar with friends, only to be abducted into a sex trafficking ring. When Nikki learns what’s happened, she employs her “very particular set of skills” to rescue her daughter. That puts her in direct conflict with the Syndicate, a criminal organization willing to kill to defend its twisted business. At one point, a member of the Syndicate comments about how they have half the police department in their pocket, so you’ll be rightly suspicious of Captain Michaels (D.B. Sweeney), the police official seeking to halt Nikki’s bloody retribution tour.

Partway through the film, Matthew Modine shows up as Col. Lavelle, Nikki’s former commanding officer. He clashes with Michaels and makes a lot of half-baked proclamations about how nobody understands what Nikki is capable of. Given the many violent deaths that occur on screen, we understand pretty well.

The overall plot of Protector is a clear ripoff of Taken. Individual scenes remind you of a couple dozen other movies starring Liam Neeson and Jason Statham. Every story point is familiar, having been utilized again and again in modern action films. Nikki gets herself into a series of perilous situations that she alone survives because of her magical Special Forces background. Those sequences are interrupted by bizarre, mistimed scenes featuring Lavelle that feel forced in from another movie altogether. (Of the cast members, Modine is the only one who seems to be playing the material for silliness.) Other weird choices are resolving Michaels’ arc way before the picture is over and having Chloe get kidnapped twice.

Worst of all is the ending, which hinges on the dumbest plot twist imaginable. Seriously, this is one of those twists that makes you want to unbolt the seats from the theater floor and throw them through the screen. It’s an insult to the audience’s intelligence, plus a cheap stunt that undermines everything that comes before it.

This movie is coming out at a time when awareness of sex trafficking is at an all-time high. The release of the Epstein files has shed new, horrific light on the abuses being inflicted upon women and children. I have the same problem with Protector that I had with Taken: the film doesn’t truly care about the subject. It just uses trafficking as a gimmick that allows for titillating violence. If it really cared, the victims would be actual characters rather than one-dimensional damsels in distress. Even Chloe - the driving motivation behind Nikki’s bloodbath - is here solely to be abducted and tortured. Director Adrian Grunberg (The Black Demon) is more concerned with staging cool kills than in showing compassion toward young women.

Bottom line: Protector is cynical junk.

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