The Protege: Film Review

Cast: Maggie Q, Samuel L Jackson, Michael Keaton, Robert Patrick
Director: Martin Campbell

New Zealand director Martin Campbell (Casino Royale) returns with a fairly formulaic thriller that doesn't quite know what it wants to be. Even if it does become a bullets and explosions style revenge thriller.

Maggie Q (Nikita) stars as Anna, an assassin raised by Samuel L Jackson's Moody after a massacre in Vietnam. On the even of Moody's 70th birthday and after having completed a string of contract hits, Anna's world is changed when Moody is gunned down in his apartment.

As she stalks his killers, a mysterious man named Rembrandt (Michael Keaton) keeps crossing her path, setting up a tantalising cat and mouse game...

The Protege is as rote as they come.

It reels in all the action cliches, with a plot that barely hangs together and stops the film from being as coherent as perhaps it should. While Campbell helms the action scenes with veritable aplomb, almost every single one of them feels ripped from the genre's playbook - and at times, resembles an episode of Q's Nikita TV series. 

If this sounds dismissive of the Protege, perhaps it is. But it's also worth acknowledging that this remains watchable enough fare in the style of the 80s B-movies that became the norm so long ago - the film morphs into a bullets and bangs outing, where enemies can fire hundreds of shots and never hit one person, but Maggie Q's Anna can fire off two shots and total the opposition with ease.

The moments where The Protege begins to gel is in its flirtation with Keaton and Q's characters. It's here you're left yearning for more, with dialogue that's flirty, tensely charged and occasionally worthy of more.

But in truth, The Protege squanders too much of that for too little purpose. Its central plot doesn't gel with what's going on and leaves you wishing this Protege had been mentored a little longer into something that's more compulsive and captivating.

The Protege is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video