“It’s funny how much training I’ve had in taking a life. Years with the 3rd Calvary, the Regiment, Special Ops. A lifetime of experience. I can tell you to the exact second how long it will take you to bleed out if I make an inch-long incision in your carotid artery. Tactics. Weapons. Munitions. Covert ops. Black ops. Battlefield triage. The logistics of death. I’ve studied it all in great depth and detail. I’ve been taught all there is to know about taking a life.”
If any of this sounds like something you’ve heard before, you’re not too far off. It calls back to Liam Neeson talking to the guys who are in the process of kidnapping his daughter. He’s telling him all about that “specific” set of skills he happens to have to make their brief remaining lives pretty brutal. That’s what we get from Milla Jovovich. She’s a highly trained killer, and now some bad guys have kidnapped her daughter. She gets there almost in time to stop it, but just not quick enough, and you don’t have to read this or any film synopsis. You don’t need to read any spoilers to know you’re about to go through 90 minutes of this one-woman army trying to save her daughter and leaving a lot of gory destruction in her wake. That’s what we get from director Adrian Grunburg’s Protector. But haven’t we seen all of this before?
“Giving a life, bringing someone into the world, caring for a child? No one tells you jack. You’re on your own.”
It’s a pretty tight setup, and though, yes, we’ve seen it all before, I’m IK with strapping myself in for a nice ride through some underground bad guys who get a lot of what they have coming. Unfortunately, that’s not what you’re going to get. Someone … Was it director Grunberg? Was it screenwriter Bong-Seob Mun? It couldn’t be Jovovich. I mean, I’ve enjoyed almost every one of her Resident Evil films, so I know she can kick butt and take names. She gives us a ticking clock. There we go, that’s going to keep us on the edge of our seats. She tells us you basically have 72 hours in a kidnapping before the trail goes cold. OK. Let’s get this bloody party started. I said let’s get this thing started. Hello. Is this thing on? Well … this isn’t going to go well at all and I’m not talking about the bad guys. I’m talking about those of us in the position of watching what unravels. And unravel is the secret word, because that’s exactly what happens almost immediately.
You see, as soon as this clock gets started, a third of it is gone. Nikki (Jovovich) has already been captured by a bad guy who goes by the name of The Butcher (Montana). We get a 30-second montage of the places she’s been and the carnage she’s left behind; then suddenly here we are in the middle of a movie only 15 minutes in.
I’m not sure who should be blamed for this. I had to double check the timecode on my Blu-ray player, because I figured somehow it skipped ahead. Nope. The film just decided to save us all some time. Thanks, but I think I must have missed the best part of the movie. At least I hope I did, because what remains isn’t the best part of anything. OK, I have to come to grips that they’re skipping key elements of the narrative. So where do we go from here?
In writing class one of the first lessons is to show, not to tell. Somebody was asleep or just was out partying on that day of class. The remaining of the film is an entirely exhausting narration by Nikki about what she needs to do, how she’s feeling today … and I went so numb to it all I’m not sure whatever else. She continues on her rage, but even the remaining action scenes are badly filmed. It might be more in the editing, but we jump around to odd angles and appear to miss steps in this action dance. The camera doesn’t appear to know exactly where it should be pointing. Hey, I get it. I’m a musician, and folks often take video of shows, and sometimes I have no idea why they are focused on the guy who isn’t doing anything at that particular time, only to pan away when his awesome solo starts. Those are just fans having fun. Some folks got paid to shoot this. I didn’t even pay anything to see it, and I still want my money back.
I’m not going to say this is the worst film I ever saw. After all, I did see Event Horizon. But this is one of the worst A-lister film I’ve seen in decades. It looks incomplete and too much like a student film, like really early in their education. For years Jovovich did great action work when directed by her husband in the Resident Evil series. The franchise admittedly had it’s good and bad, but at its worst it was never so disjointed as this. Believe it or not, I don’t enjoy hating on films. There’s nothing more fun for me than to tell you about this really good film I just saw. I just can’t do that here, because above all, “I’m a conscientious worker.”
