The Protégé – Film Review

Rescued as a child by the legendary assassin Moody (Samuel L. Jackson), Anna (Maggie Q) is the world’s most skilled contract killer. However, when Moody is brutally killed, she vows revenge for the man who taught her everything she knows. As Anna becomes entangled with an enigmatic killer named Michael Rembrandt (Michael Keaton), their confrontation turns deadly, and the loose ends of a life spent killing weave themselves ever tighter.

These days, more than ever, it seems as though the market for action/spy films is more in demand than it’s ever been. The first signs of this genre resurgence came with the long-running and immensely popular John Wick series of films which have gone from small indie action films to big blockbusters that virtually every genre junkie has seen by this point. Action films have been around for decades but during the early to mid-2010s, there really wasn’t anything too excellent out there – until John Wick. Now that more people are on board with action films, we’ve been getting quite a lot of them.

Just this year we had Gunpowder Milkshake which starred Karen Gillan as a deadly assassin with a sweet twist and most recently, Sweet Girl, starring Jason Momoa and Isabela Merced. The less said about that one, the better. But now we have our third big assassin/spy thriller and it’s in the form of The Protégé, directed by Martin Campbell, whose work ranges from masterful to good, to straight-up bad. Campbell was the director of Casino Royale which is considered by many Bond fans (myself included) to be one of the title characters’ best outings.

At the same time, however, he also directed The Legend of Zorro and the dishearteningly bland The Foreigner which absolutely wasted Jackie Chan who is one of the most likable actors ever in my opinion. I will say though – whenever Campbell is working with action (which is a lot) there is always ingredients on display that I genuinely enjoy. I just wish he would accentuate them. And I feel the same exact way about his newest film, The Protégé – an action thriller that has some promising material along the way but ultimately never makes the landing.

Sadly, the movie’s main problem all comes down to the script by Richard Wenk. For the majority of the movie, we are simply told what our lead character is going to go and we are never let in on any surprises along the way. The film is absolutely loaded with exposition and it doesn’t leave all that much up to imagination which is unfortunate, because after all, movies are supposed to be creative outlets for filmmakers and writers.

Courtesy of Lionsgate

And really, the story as a whole is kind of hard to make exciting regardless of who was in charge of penning the script. It’s basically the typical cat-and-mouse spy film where the mysterious protagonist exchanges witty banter with some people and does badass things throughout the whole film. In this case, it’s Maggie Q as Anna Dutton who makes it her life mission to track down and kill those responsible for killing her father figure, Moody. Of course, along the way, Anna goes through a bunch of trials and tribulations, and while none of them are outright bad, they’re just kind of formulaic.

Plus, we aren’t really given that much reason to care about Anna’s mission mainly because we don’t get to see or hear too much about their relationship and how they grew to be so close to one another. Every once in a while, the film will pepper in scenes where we watch a younger Moody and Anna as a child conversing with one another but it’s never really about anything serious. There’s never that one moment where everything clicks and you suddenly understand why they care about each other as deeply as they do.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand why she wants to track down these people and kill them – they killed somebody that she viewed as a father figure. This sort of storyline can actually be brilliant, as depicted in my all-time favorite video game The Last of Us Part II, but in that game, we truly understand why Ellie wanted revenge on Abby. Here, we aren’t given too much of a reason to care beyond the fact that Anna lost somebody she loves.

What I will say, though, is that Maggie Q is quite a lot of fun to watch in the film and it was clear to me that she had a blast while filming it. Throughout her career, she has had a number of exciting, action-packed roles but she feels more energetic and charismatic than ever in the role of Anna. While she sadly wasn’t given too much to work with, she definitely rose to the occasion and made the best out of a lackluster script. And the same thing can be said about Michael Keaton, who is easily one of my favorite actors to ever grace the big screen.

Here, he is wonderfully creepy while also being incredibly mysterious. He’s the type of person that, just by looking at them, you get the feeling that they could kill you at will if they wanted to. The most interesting character in this story should’ve been Anna, but I actually found myself wanting to learn more about Keaton’s character Michael Rembrandt more than anybody else. But the two actors do have terrific chemistry here and it was genuinely heartwarming in a way to see how much fun these extremely accomplished actors had while filming this movie.

It’s a visually impressive film and it has a fair amount of fun action sequences sprinkled throughout (including the incredible opening) but they are so few and far between. This film needed to have a genuinely good scriptwriter to inject a sense of adventure and originality into the story, but sadly, Wenk did not rise to the occasion. Maggie Q, Michael Keaton, and the rest of the cast and crew did the best with what little breadcrumbs they had.