The Protégé

You've seen most of this before, brutality, revenge, rich people. I liked the cat and mouse chemistry between Keaton and Q despite the age difference. A good throwback feel.

It's a pretty decent assassin seeking revenge story, we all know the drill as we've all seen a million of them.

Maggie Q is who she is in everything, and is always good at it.

Michael Keaton was surprisingly good, but I'm always surprised he can act, despite his long and varied career.

The story was the weak point, but as it was a bog-standard revenge story with an extremely obvious twist at the end, that isn't surprising or even a particular detriment.

Sure yeah the story isn't the most interesting or original, but the lead actors are great, it's paced very well and the action is good, sometimes illogical but good, far from fast and furious illogical. You won't go back to it but it's as entertaining as it is forgettable. I think it's made to entertain, not to picked apart by movie analysts, and in that regard it's a great movie. It's a John wick type of fun.

The Protégé attempts to make a played out genre its own by adding awkward banter and misfired quips. The action, while fair, is the clear focus of this production because the plot is clunky and uninteresting. This is exacerbated by Maggie Q's bland acting. She tries to achieve the assured demeanor that the script is hoping for but she comes across wooden and forced. This isn't solely her fault since the dialogue wishes it was much cooler than it actually is. But Maggie does not elevate the role in any meaningful way.

From a technical perspective, The Protégé is decent enough. The action is the film's redeeming quality because the shot choices, choreography, and special effects are all adequate. Once, the music even enhances a fight scene to highlight juxtaposing emotions at hand. Yet, this is outweighed by the contrived and cringe writing. In almost every way, the script fails the audience because the story is unoriginal, the conversations lack wit, and the characters are flat. Often, The Protégé outright tells us how to feel instead of giving us real reasons to care, leaving viewers to groan at a marginally subpar piece of work.

Writing: 2/10 Direction: 4/10 Cinematography: 5/10 Acting: 4/10 Editing: 5/10 Sound: 6/10 Score/Soundtrack: 6/10 Production Design: 4/10 Casting: 5/10 Effects: 6/10

Overall Score: 4.7/10.

'The Protégé' was a perfectly fine simple action film up to an hour into it.

After that, the characters were just set loose. I was unable to understand why was anyone doing what they were doing. Every character's motivation was beyond me. What was the point of Jackson's fakeout? Why did Maggie Q and Keaton have a Mr. & Mrs. Smith dynamic but not really? Why does Jackson give moral speeches to people before the assassinations, this seems just a little hypocritical? Why did Maggie Q want a normal life in peace when she clearly had one and she never showed any signs of discontent with her murdering lots of people for money (it was more like she enjoyed it)? Barely anything makes sense in this film.

In the end, it seemed like Moody was the main villain and not some generic corrupt businessman. I mean, he never cared for the hacker kid who got steamed because of him, or his maid, he was perfectly fine with dead bodies piling up.

The thing is if you want to write in a twist - do so. Something stupid happening can't be a twist by itself. You can trick a viewer by showing him/her what you want, but not the characters of your film, it just doesn't work like that. The viewer assumes that if something affected a character's motivation - this actually happened.

Overall, 'The Protégé' feels like a moderately budgeted action film with a couple of big names filmed in cheaper and convenient countries with no-name extras. And this works alright until the characters become sentient and just do whatever they want at the moment.