The Protégé review: Maggie Q kicks butt in a thriller that doesn’t respect her

Divergent Y Nikita star Maggie Q deserves a starring role, but The protégé doesn’t deserve Maggie Q. A lady-killer action movie in numbers in the mold of Anna, Atomic blonde, Y Ava, The protégé it just feels bold in its willingness to break the alliterative titular pattern of this particular subgenre. Otherwise everything is a standard postJohn wick Things: the magnificent assassin is betrayed, is dedicated to revenge and is responsible for a wave of violence in international places. “Murder I, Maggie Q ”would be an appropriate response to The protégéBut giving in to thirst means rolling your eyes through a fair amount of nonsense.

The protégé is a film about a woman made by men, often the case in this subgenre, as with the recent Gunpowder shake. Director Martin Campbell and writer Richard Wenk elaborate their main character with the usual and unsurprising mix of gender stereotypes. Anna Dutton (Maggie Q) is a badass who can identify guns by the sound her bullets make entering the chamber, but she also wears Manolo Blahniks and designer clothes. He bakes apple pies from scratch in his multi-million dollar La Cornue oven, and you can also do numerous waterboarding sessions without losing your cool. It is only because of his impenetrable self-assurance that the character is held together, and only because of your commitment As a martial artist and stuntman the action scenes have some verve or emotion. None of the men around her (and it is, of course, only men around her) can really keep up.

The protégé begins in Vietnam in 1991, when the murderer Moody Dutton (Samuel L. Léon: the professional Y Kill Bill: Volume 1, takes Anna under his wing. At that moment, she is a girl (Eva Nguyen Thorsen) with a gun in her hand and a series of rebel bodies scattered around her. Thirty years later, that girl has become Anna, Moody’s close friend and partner in the gun rental business. They live luxuriously in London with palatial residences and top-notch cars, they do jobs across Europe and are each other’s only royal family.

But shortly after Moody turns 70, three events change Anna’s life. First, he asks you to find out what happened to a 9-year-old boy named Lucas Hayes, whom Moody was responsible for protecting in Vietnam when he was there in the 1990s, but who disappeared after his father Edward, a notorious criminal. of war. , was killed by a car bomb. Second, Anna meets a mysterious man named Rembrandt (Michael Keaton), who flirts with her by quoting Edgar Allan Poe and calling her “interesting.” (It is a compliment as insignificant as “good”). And third, Anna realizes that Moody’s questions about Lucas will lead her back to Vietnam, so she finally decides to return to her country of birth to find answers about the case and about herself.

Aside from the trope “Killer woman goes home to become whole”, which is so familiar that Black widow extended it to a full movie, The protégé it becomes a pretzel made up of different agendas, hidden identities, and shared stories. All of this is wrapped around Anna, which means that Maggie Q shares most of her scenes with male actors decades her senior: Jackson, playing her father figure; Keaton, playing his love interest; and Robert Patrick, playing a motorcycle ally named Billy Boy.

Each of those actors brings their own individual energy to the end of their career – Jackson is in the same mode he’s been through both of them. Hitman’s Bodyguard movies, while Keaton basically repeats Vulture from Spider-Man: Homecoming. Although the familiarity of these performances makes viewing undemanding, it also imbues Anna’s pairings with a certain repetitive similarity. She is not treated as a child prodigy or apprentice as much as she is treated as everyone’s daughter, and that dynamic gives her a particular grit when the movie pushes her and Keaton against each other, the bodies moving in something that we must assume that it is sex. (While Campbell and Wenk are totally comfortable showing off exploded and decapitated heads, or the splatters of blood from murdered children, they are strangely cautious about showing Maggie Q and Keaton kissing.)

And while Maggie Q defends herself against these bombastic personalities by downplaying her line deliveries and relying on slightly baffled sarcasm, The protégé you often feel trapped in a march. The film only comes to life during its action scenes, which benefit from its grace and power. In one sequence, he opens a cell phone with a knife hidden inside, stabs a man in the neck, and then kicks other attackers in opposite directions. In another, she throws a dagger into a wild arc, slides through a ventilation system, tiptoes through a narrow pipe as bullets surround her, then darts off a balcony, using a fire hose to rappel down several floors. .

This is a movie where Maggie Q is swinging off a rope. She shoots through a refrigerator door and drenches her attacker in milk and chunks of food; she turns around, kicks and shoots. But all of that happens in the same movie that asks her to keep a straight face as she says, “Are you pointing a gun at my pussy and then asking me to go to bed? I like your style. “Some of The protégéThe missteps can be tolerated because the movie gives Maggie Q a lead role with some teeth, but that line asks for too much. The protégé You can’t just let Anna kick butt – she has to tackle a struggling romantic subplot whose main role seems to be to insist that Anna is a wild sexual being. Is that relevant to the story at hand? Not really. It’s a shame Maggie Q was so busy loading The protégé on his back that he couldn’t make time to shape the movie’s embarrassing script.

The Protégé opens in theaters on August 20.