Protector, 2025.
Directed by Adrian Grunberg.
Starring Milla Jovovich, Matthew Modine, Isabel Myers, D. B. Sweeney, Don Harvey, Gabriel Sloyer, Michael Stahl-David, Brooklyn Sudano, Texas Battle, Yoko Hamamura, Lydia Hull, and Arica Himmel.
SYNOPSIS:
Former war hero Nikki’s peaceful life is shattered when her daughter is kidnapped. Thrust into the criminal underworld while hunted by cops and military, she must fight to rescue her child.
When a grenade is tossed into a room, some people live and die at random. In this scenario, Milla Jovovich’s former special-ops military agent, Nikki Halstead, is the grenade. Directed by Adrian Grunberg, Protector sees the veteran action star bursting with rage, taking down sex traffickers involved with the kidnapping of her daughter Chloe (Isabel Myers) in gruesome high-octane action scenes that feel supercharged from what is typically seen in this sub-genre, not just in terms of violence but also physics-defying implausibility.
Nikki is such a driven character, seemingly capable of Alice-like agility (from the Resident Evil movie series), hopping across rooftops and landing on top of the vehicle transporting her kidnapped daughter, one doesn’t start wondering how she will be rescued, but how the villains will get away with this, to fully put the narrative in motion. It’s a scene that could have been the climax for any Taken movie or anything adjacent to this type of action flick; here, it’s in the first 15 minutes. It’s the warm-up to overcoming brutal torture and subsequently inflicting more sadistic violence (at one point, biting someone’s ear off) on people who unquestionably deserve it.
The action here is visceral and bloody, with sometimes cartoonish execution. Naturally, that feels at odds with a story that also wants to be taken as something serious, dropping sensationalistic statistical data about sex trafficking. That also turns out to be the least of this film’s problems, whether it’s narrative unfolding with major time gaps (and narration filling in), a ticking time clock that begins to make zero sense in the context of where the film goes and what’s happening) and a clunky subplot with law enforcement (who might be dirty with ties to the operation) jawing with Nikki’s former military superior (Matthew Modine), warning everyone he can that this is a decorated war veteran who can dispatch of anyone and will stop at nothing to complete any mission, let alone a deeply personal one such as this.
Protector is violent fun when it sticks to Milla Jovovich rampaging her way through clubs masked as sex dens, guarded homes with security patrolling about, and gunning her way up floor by floor once discovering the center of the trafficking ring. Whenever attempting to tell a story, it is weak and includes a reveal that calls into question what anyone wanted to achieve with this film. Part of that frustration comes from a missed opportunity to elaborate on a unique dynamic between mother and daughter, with Nikki finally home for good after serving her country, but having missed so many years and birthdays that it hasn’t quite settled in that Chloe is in her teenage years.
There is no doubt that everyone involved started from a place of good intentions, but lost the plot, getting a bit too bold with what the story is doing. Suddenly, all those wonky story details and asides mentioned above snap into place, but at the service of something almost cruelly bleak and tasteless. If the point was to get at the reality of sex trafficking, there has to be a better way of doing that than this story, which becomes reduced to a flashy plot twist rather than anything meaningful or substantial.
Part of Protector could be read as anti-military service, but that’s most likely inadvertent, considering the movie also sees Nikki as a one-woman wrecking crew for sex traffickers, set to copious philosophical narrations about field experience and applying it here. It’s an epidemic that, apparently, only former soldiers can solve. This is a confused film, nonetheless marginally salvaged by an intense, savagely violent performance by Milla Jovovich.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Robert Kojder
