"The Protector" Movie Review

As you can imagine, it’s very rare that I see something truly new in a movie.  And I don’t mean in a good way.

The Protector made $12.00 in theaters this past week and sadly, it was my money.

It was worse than a Netflix excuse for a movie.  It starred Milla Jovovivh and I thought to myself, “Even at 50, she must still be okay to look at so, if nothing else, I have that.”  Wrong, she was all “momed” up with a short haircut and a 16 year old daughter.  But that wasn’t the problem.  Nor was the weak story, shitty editing, or the high school acting.

Get this….

In the beginning, after they first steal her daughter for human trafficking, she takes chase and catches up with the bad guys and takes to a car chase, car crash, kills like 2 people, and they still make off with the now drugged up teenager.

At some point in all of this melee the grizzled, war-torn (she was like a special ops Rambo killing machine), voiceover, reminds the audience that statistically a kidnapping case goes cold after 72 hours.  So, she sets her ginormous Army watch for a 72-hour timer which they cut to several times in the movie to remind us that time is running out and in case you aren’t feeling it, the tension is mounting.  But here’s the thing, the “72-hour” thing isn’t a timed event, it’s a very generic timeframe.  It isn’t meant to indicate that, “You better find your daughter in 72-hours because at 72-hours and five minutes, she’s a goner!  It’s a reference, an idea that time is of the essence and with every minute that ticks by, your chances of recovery are slimmer and slimmer.

So the movie plays out building the tension as it shows us, “12 hours left” and 3 hours remaining” and “14 minutes” until, I don’t even know what.  And here’s the best part, at the very end, when she’s up against the main bad guy, the last man standing after she’s killed like 30 of his bodyguards, and he’s got a gun to her daughters head, we cut to her dinner plate sized watch and 4 seconds remaining.  She’s in the room with her daughter!  She found her!  The 72-hour hook is moot now – yet she eyeballs the seconds as they tick away and decides that she has to take the shot before, Oh My, before time runs out.  She takes the shot as the timer reads 0:00 and kills the bad man.  It was a huge hook to the drama yet means nothing if you think about it as I have.

Wait, it gets better.  At one point she rescues her daughter and they kidnap her back again, but she doesn’t reset her watch!  She assumes that the re-kidnapping is all part of the same crime so the same 72-hour period simply continues.  In their line of thinking, the timer should have at least been reset at the start of the second kidnapping.

And by the way, that opening when they take the kid and she gets her back initially, she wakes up in the hospital after being thrown from the car and the police reference her having “killed 8 men and burnt down the club last night”.  But here’s the problem with that, she never killed 8 mean and there was no fire at all, let alone in the club.

It’s as if an entire segment was cut from the movie but they failed to remove at least 3 or 4 references to it through the movie.

Too funny!

- Paul Rosen