The Protégé

Maggie Q has always struck me as an actress who deserves better in Hollywood.  Sure, she's had some success with TV, but when you consider her beauty and screen presence, as well as her skill with fight choreography (she was a student of Jackie Chan for a while), it's kind of surprising that the film world has not really capitalized on her.  The Protégé gives her the leading role and a potential action franchise, and while there's not much here that audiences haven't seen before, it has enough style and a surprising amount of wit to make it worth watching.

Director Martin Campbell is no stranger to franchise heroes, as he's worked with everyone from James Bond to Zorro, and even Green Lantern. (Yes, the movie Ryan Reynolds loves to remind us he regrets doing.) He not only gives Q an original character to play at least, but he also teams her up with two old pros here, Samuel L. Jackson and, most notably, Michael Keaton.  The wordplay between Keaton and Q is what makes this movie stand out.  Part flirty banter, and part veiled threat, their scenes play out as a bizarre mix of assassin thriller and screwball romantic comedy that not only oddly works, but is the key element that stands out in the film.  There's a scene about midway through where the two are trying to kill each other, but you can also feel the romantic tension.  Finally, Keaton says the best line in the film.  Sadly, it's something I can't print in a family-friendly review, but he basically says what I was thinking the whole time I was watching the scene, and it ends with the two of them under the sheets.

 

Maggie Q plays Anna, the titular protégé to an assassin named Moody (Jackson).  Moody has been in the business a long time, and judging by his frequent coughing fits, he probably should have left it a long time ago.  We see in an opening flashback that Moody found Anna as a child 30 years ago in Vietnam hiding in a closet, covered in blood, and holding a gun in an attempt to fend off the people who murdered her family.  Since then, he has trained her in the art of killing, and Anna has become just as proficient as he is.  Sure, she does her best to lead a normal life when she's not at her "real job".  She goes jogging every morning, dotes after her pet cat, and runs a rare book store in London.  But, murder has always been her business.  She makes sure she only goes after "bad people who deserve it", but as Moody likes to remind her, it doesn't really matter.

When Moody himself becomes the target of a hit, Anna must take on the role of the master for the first time and do her own investigation into not only the men responsible for it, but the one who issued it.  This will force her to return to her homeland of Vietnam, which holds nothing but pain for her, and where she vowed she would never return to after her childhood trauma.  But, she has to investigate who is pulling the strings behind the hitmen that seem to be following her every step of her investigation.  Chief among them is Michael Rembrandt (Keaton), who despite being on the opposite side of her mission, definitely feels a connection with her, as does she with him.  Their complex relationship, as well as their dialogue provided by Richard Weck (The Equalizer movies), is what makes this stand out amongst your typical revenge action thriller.

The Protégé is finely polished, and a bit slicker than you would expect from an action thriller being released so late in the summer.  The film is appropriately brutal and violent, but I appreciated the way that Campbell shoots the action, letting us admire the fights, and not using too many cuts and no rapid-fire editing.  This allows Q to show that she has more than enough physical prowess to carry an action movie such as this, but it also shows that Keaton (who is just a few weeks shy of hitting 70 as I write this) also still has what it takes to pull off an action-heavy role.  It's not just their dialogue and screen chemistry that drew me in, but it's also how they both handle themselves in the many action sequences and narrow escapes the movie throws them into.  And I appreciated how the film was letting me savor each moment of the stunt work.

Sure, you can argue that the movie is pretty lockstep with a lot of other similar movies, save for the relationship that the two leads share.  You could also argue that the movie relies on the fact that no matter how many goons the villain seems to send after her, none of them seem to be able to come close to hitting their target, while she seems able to wipe them out in a matter of minutes.  You would not be wrong.  But, the movie has an energy and a life to it that helps lift it up.  These are professionals in this kind of stuff, and it's a joy to watch them work together.  And sure, Samuel L. Jackson could play his type of character in his sleep by now, but even he is still a lot of fun in his supporting role.  He's certainly put to better use here than he was just a couple months ago in Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard, and he was one of the leads in that one.  

I'm not sure if I would want to see this morph into a series of films, but I would love for The Protégé to be successful enough that it leads to the film career that Maggie Q deserves.  I also would love to see her star alongside Keaton again.  They're so much fun together here, it would be a shame to just limit them to these characters. 

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