All of this is wrapped around Anna, which means that Maggie Q shares most of her scenes with male actors decades older than her: Jackson, playing her father figure Keaton, playing her love interest and Robert Patrick, playing a motorcycle-riding ally named Billy Boy.Įach of those actors brings in their own individual late-career freewheeling energy: Jackson is in the same mode he’s been in through both Hitman’s Bodyguard movies, while Keaton is basically reprising Vulture from Spider-Man: Homecoming.
Second, Anna meets a mysterious man named Rembrandt (Michael Keaton), who flirts with her by quoting Edgar Allan Poe and calling her “interesting.” (It’s as meaningless a compliment as “fine.”) And third, Anna realizes Moody’s questions about Lucas will lead her back to Vietnam, so she decides to finally return to her birth country to find answers about the case, and herself.Īside from the “female assassin goes home to become whole” trope, which is so familiar that Black Widow extended it into an entire film, The Protégé gets twisted into a pretzel made up of varying agendas, hidden identities, and shared histories. First, he asks her to find out what happened to a 9-year-old boy named Lucas Hayes, who Moody was responsible for protecting in Vietnam when he was there in the 1990s, but who disappeared after his father Edward, a noted war criminal, was killed by a car bomb. They live poshly in London with palatial residences and top-tier cars, they do jobs all over Europe, and they’re each other’s only real family.īut soon after Moody turns 70, three events change Anna’s life. Thirty years later, that girl has grown up to be Anna, Moody’s close friend and partner in the gun-for-hire business. At the time, she’s a young girl (Eva Nguyen Thorsen) with a gun in her hand and an array of rebels’ bodies scattered around her.
#PROTEGE CAR MAKE PROFESSIONAL#
Jackson), in nods to Léon: The Professional and Kill Bill: Volume 1, takes Anna under his wing. The Protégé begins in Vietnam in 1991, when assassin Moody Dutton (Samuel L. None of the men around her (and it is, of course, only men around her) can really keep up. It’s only because of her impenetrable self-assuredness that the character holds together at all, and only because of her commitment as a martial artist and stuntwoman that the action scenes have any verve or thrill. She bakes apple pies from scratch in her multi-thousand-dollar La Cornue oven, and can also power through numerous waterboarding sessions without losing her cool. Anna Dutton (Maggie Q) is a badass who can identify guns by the sound their bullets make entering the chamber, but she also wears Manolo Blahniks and designer clothes. Director Martin Campbell and writer Richard Wenk craft their titular character with the usual unsurprisingly bland blend of gender stereotypes.
#PROTEGE CAR MAKE MOVIE#
The Protégé is a movie about a woman made by men - often the case for this subgenre, as with the recent Gunpowder Milkshake. “Murder me, Maggie Q” would be an appropriate response to The Protégé, but giving into the thirst means eye-rolling through a fair amount of silliness. Otherwise, it’s all standard-issue post- John Wick stuff: Gorgeous female killer is betrayed, devotes herself to vengeance, and is responsible for a spree of violence in international locales.
A by-the-numbers lady-assassin action flick in the mold of Anna, Atomic Blonde, and Ava, The Protégé only feels daring in its willingness to break the alliterative titular pattern of this particular subgenre. Divergent and Nikita star Maggie Q deserves a starring role, but The Protégé doesn’t deserve Maggie Q.
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