Mark Reviews Movies: THE PROTÉGÉ

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 19, 2021

Director Martin Campbell and screenwriter Richard Wenk could have coasted on the action of The Protégé. The filmmakers could have relied entirely on the cast here, which is headlined by stars Maggie Q, Michael Keaton, and Samuel L. Jackson—each of them capable of bringing something intriguing or slightly different to the table. To be sure, Campbell delivers on the action sequences, and the cast does do some entertaining and occasionally off-kilter work here. The moments of the film that stick, though, are when it allows itself to be playful, and the ones that stick even more are when Wenk and Campbell shift to an unexpected but surprisingly effective minor key.

The story here is nothing too special. We've seen it told many times, in many different ways, and with few variations. It's about a master assassin, the mysterious, calm, cool and fatally efficient Anna (Q, who's calm and cool, with flashes of pain, in the role). She only kills people who "have it coming"—bad guys like mobsters and war criminals and other varieties of "evil," as her mentor likes to differentiate them from "corrupt" folks like himself and Anna.

The mentor is Moody (Jackson, adding a touch of regret to his persona), who rescued a very young Anna—not that she needed much rescuing when he found her, since she killed the men holding her hostage—from a gang in Da Nang, Vietnam, and got her out of that country. For 30 years, the two have worked together, bringing violent ends to very bad people through all sorts of trickery, cunning, and weapons. After the prologue of Moody saving Anna as a girl, that's how we're first introduced to the pair: abducting the son of a Bucharest gangster, demanding a ransom, and using the opportunity of a money exchange as a way to get to the real target—the father.

At first, at least, it seems as if we know exactly how the tone of this story and the purpose of these characters will unfold. Anna dispatches the gangster and his guards with quick efficiency, and as she walks out the front door and to her vehicle, she never loses her confident stride or even looks back as more goons start chasing after and shooting her (Moody, hidden away somewhere with a sniper rifle, helps). It's all very nonchalant and stylish, and again, maybe with enough of that attitude, this story might have worked.

There's more to it, though, as we learn through some dialogue between Anna, who runs a rare book store on the side and has a real passion for the trade, and Moody, who celebrates his 70th birthday with some irritation and a sense of finally wanting to set his mind at as much ease as a professional assassin can. He's looking—just looking, he asserts—for the now-adult son of one his past targets, and that might mean a return trip to Vietnam. Anna never wants to go there again, because of whatever happened to her that resulted in her being kidnapped by and having to kill a bunch of criminals.

If this film only cared about its action, we wouldn't have scenes such as this one or the others that follow it. If it only cared about the plot, which has Anna going to Vietnam after the man for whom Moody is looking makes it violently clear that he doesn't want to be found, it wouldn't worry about Anna's strange relationship with another killer, a clean-up man named Rembrandt (Keaton, with plenty of snaky and snarky charm), who works for whoever doesn't want the target's son to be found. If it just cared about allowing the charisma of the actors to carry the material, the screenplay wouldn't give them scenes of contemplating what they've done, how they can atone for or escape those actions or events, and what the future could possibly hold for people trapped in an ongoing, never-ceasing cycle of violence.

This isn't to suggest that Wenk's screenplay digs deeply into these characters and ideas. It is to say that, in actually taking the time to acknowledge that there's more to these characters than their abilities to fight and kill with ruthless proficiency, the film displays that it possesses some thoughts and considerations in its head. Sometimes, that's enough.

It's certainly enough here, although the action sequences and the performances do a lot of the legwork, too. The action is surprisingly intermittent, given the story, but when those scenes arrive, there's an admirable level of clarity to them. Campbell allows shots to breathe, such as when Anna scrambles through air ducts to avoid being shot, and cameras setups to let us see the actors at work, such as when Rembrandt is ambushed in a market (letting us note that Keaton still has a few moves left in him).

The centerpiece sequence (although that escape from a high rise, in which Anna uses her wits—an electrical cable and water from sprinklers—as much as her acrobatic skill, and the fight in the market are quite solid) is a brawl between Anna and Rembrandt, who occasionally pause mid-fight to exchange long looks and raised eyebrows. The punch line is amusing, as is an earlier scene, in which the two killers flirt with pistols aimed at each other under a restaurant table (The dialogue, a lot of quick back-and-forth give-and-takes, is smarter and more direct than it needs to be, which helps).

The Protégé does exactly what we expect it to and does those things well. In bringing an air of playfulness and an aura of mournfulness to the material, the film does what we don't expect, too.

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