Milla Jovovich takes on human trafficking in this action thriller

Plot:  Nikki, a veteran war hero, thought she’d left her violent past behind for a peaceful life with her daughter, Chloe – until Chloe is kidnapped by a human trafficking ring that forces Nikki into the city’s criminal underworld on a relentless pursuit. As she tears through a ruthless crime syndicate using her military training, Nikki draws the attention of both the police and the military, shooting her to the top of the most wanted list. In this high-stakes race against time, Nikki must use the violent skills she thought she left behind to save her daughter.

Review: Milla Jovovich is a straight-up asskicker. There is no argument to the contrary. For the last twenty-five years, Jovovich has headlined stunt-heavy projects big and small, almost always playing the hero. While her work has predominantly been in horror and science-fiction movies with Luc Besson or Paul W.S. Anderson, Milla Jovovich has branched out with other directors time and again. Her latest film, Protector, is a more grounded thriller with no CGI and no supernatural trappings but still focused on monsters, this time of the human variety. Playing a mother out to rescue her kidnapped daughter from human traffickers, Protector is heavy on the hand-to-hand combat that delivers multiple opportunities for Milla Jovovich to use her particular set of skills. Beyond that, this is a movie light on logic and even lighter on a cohesive narrative. Try as it might, Protector is an underwhelming movie.

Opening with on-screen text decrying the prevalence of human trafficking in the United States and the world at large, Protector starts with Nikki Halsted (Milla Jovovich) deployed as a soldier overseas. On her third birthday, we see the passage of time and the missed opportunities to spend time as a family due to Nikki’s commitment to the armed forces. Finally home for her daughter’s sixteenth birthday, Nikki and Chloe (Isabel Myers) fight over Nikki’s constant absences and overprotectiveness. Chloe sneaks out to a bar with her friends, where she is drugged and kidnapped. Paranoid Nikki was already tracking Chloe, and the first major action scene kicks off the film’s conceit: a parent has 72 hours to find their child before the odds are they will never be found. While that is an approximation, Protector takes it literally, and the on-screen countdown begins.

While the idea is intriguing, Protector immediately skips almost 30 hours into the countdown with no explanation of how Nikki figures out the intel she does, but it puts her on a path to track down members of the trafficking gang known as The Syndicate. Nikki progressively faces off with henchmen of The Syndicate’s leader, The Chairman (Gabriel Sloyer). From The Butcher (Manny Montana) to Mr. Sullivan (Don Harvey), Nikki fights her way back to Chloe and kills everyone in her path. For the majority of Protector, Milla Jovovich is mowing down bad guys through car chases, house fights, compound battles, torture scenes, and none of them with any real break. Jovovich is almost the only character in her scenes, aside from the faceless goons she fights. The rest of the cast are in their own scenes where police Captain Michael (D.B. Sweeney) discusses how to stop Nikki with detectives Blake (Michael Stahl-David) and Jane (Lydia Hull), as well as with Nikki’s former military commander, Colonel Joseph Lavelle (Matthew Modine).

Throughout the movie, something feels a bit off. There are some weaker elements of the production that I could excuse as budgetary constraints, but they almost all occur outside the action scenes. When Milla Jovovich is in fight mode, Protector is a blast. The choreographed stuntwork here is good, with a nice balance of knife, gun, and grappling fights, along with an impressive chase scene at the beginning of the movie and the compound battle at the end. Each fight is bloody and intense, though they do start to get a little repetitive by the final minutes of the film. The problems in Protector stem from weak dialogue and even weaker narrative twists. No one talks like a real person; some responses are delivered in a robotic manner, making me wonder if the actors were all given the same script. It is often easy to overlook weak plot points when the action is really good, but Protector is not quite at that level of forgivability.

Director Adrian Grunberg has directed Mel Gibson in Get the Gringo, Sylvester Stallone in Rambo: Last Blood, and Josh Lucas in The Black Demon, three very different action movies, but he seems to be headed in the wrong direction with Protector. Screenwriter Bong-Seob Mun strives to copy the template set by Taken, written by Milla Jovovich’s former husband, Luc Besson, but fails to capture any nuance in crafting a story about a parent out to find their child by any means necessary. Operating with a restricted budget, Grunberg does what he can to deliver what the audience came to see, but Protector feels deliberately structured with the blandest dialogue possible to facilitate easier translation in dubs or subtitles for foreign markets. There was so much potential in this movie, and I liked a lot of things, especially the bass-heavy score by Don Cherel, but even Milla Jovovich plowing down bad guys for ninety minutes requires a little more logic.

Protector feels like a copy of a copy of a copy of Taken, which has lost the energy and uniqueness that film brought to the action genre. Even a final act twist fails to invigorate Protector into anything other than a generic action movie. Milla Jovovich should be above this, and I never thought I would say that I missed her collaborations with Paul W.S. Anderson, but at least the Resident Evil movies didn’t take themselves too seriously. Protector is not a fun movie to watch as it deals with very serious subject matter, but what it sacrifices in narrative sense it fails to make up for in any other way. If you are fine with only looking up from your phone during the violence, then Protector is up your alley. Everyone else should steer clear.

Protector is now playing in theaters.

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