Last week when I went to see BLADES OF THE GUARDIANS: WIND RISES IN THE DESERT I saw some exciting trailers, including one for a kidnapped daughter action vehicle starring the great Milla Jovovich (THE THREE MUSKETEERS). And it was coming out this week. January came late this year, fellas! I hope this doesn’t mean Milla wants to abdicate her crown as the queen of digital FX horror/fantasy action movie bullshit (RESIDENT EVIL, ULTRAVIOLET, HELLBOY 2019, MONSTER HUNTER, IN THE LOST LANDS, etc.), but I was excited to see her in a straight ahead TAKEN type deal. So you bet I was at the 12:10 pm Friday matinee of PROTECTOR.

The director is Adrian Grünberg (GET THE GRINGO). Fortunately it doesn’t have all the problems of his movie RAMBO: LAST BLOOD, but it has a similar brain-fried-by-Facebook world view. An even-more-heavy-handed-than-the-rest-of-the-movie intro tells us that while American soldiers were being sent overseas a war was being fought at home against human trafficking. I’m not sure who or what that refers to though because our story is about one of the people who is overseas who will later begin a one-woman war against said criminal activity.

Military conflict is represented through stock footage. We see a superior officer break the news to his men that the President has deployed them to The Middle East. Then we also see a news report about the deployment to The Middle East. Nobody bothers to find out which specific country we’re at war with. I mean who cares, really.

Nikki (Jovovich) is introduced talking about how hard it is to be a soldier and a mother at the same time. We see her face in closeup, Jovovich doing what she can with a not-great monologue while her face shows off the magic of present day Milla – that uncommon combination of weathered and beautiful. She’s in a dark room, perhaps talking to a therapist? No, it turns out she’s just talking to us, from within the dark void where a narrator exists while narrating, I guess. She says they taught her everything about how to kill, about special ops and black ops and similar phrases, she could tell us exactly how many seconds it would take us to bleed out if she cut one inch into our carotid artery. I have my doubts, since she does not tell us how many seconds, but she says she knows. And it’s ironic, she says, that when it comes to creating a life, to being a mother, “They don’t tell you jack shit. You’re on your own.”

(Mothers, is this true? There’s no information out there about parenting, and everybody’s staying tight-lipped about it? I did not know this before.)

Over the years, according to the montage, Nikki’s daughter Chloe (Isabel Myers, AN AMERICAN GIRL STORY: MELODY 1963 – LOVE HAS TO WIN) seems very understanding about Mom’s deployments. But on Chloe’s 16th birthday they have a fight and Chloe sneaks out to a brew pub with her friends. In the tradition of TAKEN’s “the very moment your daughter begins her European vacation she will be abducted by sex traffickers” bluntness, Nikki tracks Chloe to the restaurant by phone and runs in just as she’s being dragged into a van.

This is some real goofy shit and also a moment when the movie comes alive as badass action. The abductor Ben (Shane Williams) is a good hateable villain, a hunky-boy with dreamy mullet and earring who charms her and roofies her and minutes later is absolutely terrified yelling “WHO IS THAT BITCH?” as Nikki’s chasing after his car on foot, punching through his windshield, poking out the driver’s eye with her car key. Attack helicopter parenting. It almost seems like she’s gonna save the day at the very beginning of the movie, but she loses him.

In her capacity as narrator Nikki is always telling us things that “they say,” because this is a world view based only on things that “they say.” The biggest one here is the one about if you don’t find a missing person within 72 hours they’re statistically likely to be dead. She takes that so literally that she sets a 72 hour countdown on screen and on her watch. But it immediately skips over a bunch of those hours to when she wakes up hanging upside down on a meat hook.

Oh, okay, so she didn’t make it to a hospital after that fight, the bad guys scooped her up off the street and have her in captivity? Nope. Her tormentor “The Butcher” (couldn’t find on IMDb) complains that she burned down their “best whorehouse,” but he doesn’t care that she killed Ben because he was just a low level “spotter.” For me it was a real what the fuck choice to skip over those events. Also this Butcher character is really corny, he’s so proud to refer to people as “livestock” and make so many meat allusions that I sincerely started to question whether the implication was that they’re also cannibals.

But you know what? Milla is going so hard in this scene, seemingly really hanging upside down with the blood rushing to her head, like Heather Matarazzo in HOSTEL PART II. It looks so painful. The Butcher’s phone rings (a land line in the human meat shop?) and he makes the smart ass comment “Can you hold this for me?” before stabbing a knife into her leg. We can all guess what she will do while his back is turned, and when she does the movie is on fire again. The action scenes are nothing new, but well executed, as Milla’s usually are. (Fight coordinator: Yoko Hamamura; stunt coordinator: Joshua Mabie.)

Nikki is kind of a Punisher or a Peppermint. I forgot it was the director of LAST BLOOD so I was surprised by some pretty over-the-top brutality on her part, like cutting off a guy’s ears, or when she bites off a chunk of something or other during a fight and spits it out and in the Surround Sound it sounds like it hit the back wall of the theater. I like the part where she goes into a hardware store and buys a few things that she’ll use for an attack, but I think there’s a bit of a misstep in that they really emphasize her needing a skateboard, and she carries it and you rub your hands together excited to see what it’s for, and then all she does is slide under a car one time. Then hit a guy with it somehow so hard it makes him fly off the ground. But she does not skate away on it, unfortunately. If she had it would’ve justified the amount of build-up.

I get a kick out of a movie with Jovovich doing grim, tough lady narration about her revenge procedures. It’s too bad, though, that the script by newcomer Mun Bong-Seob is so notably dumb. It honestly plays like one of those regional vanity action movies that went straight to VHS in the ‘80s and ‘90s, except performed by real actors. It seems like he thinks he invented the cliche that if you were in special forces you can do all types of badass shit, and needs to explain it in detail. I guess I’m sensitive because it reminds me of scenes I’ve written and my worst fear is that they’ll come across this phoney. If they do, you are justified in laughing at them.

She’s narrating about how well trained Sullivan’s men are, describing how they hold their guns and what not but meanwhile they don’t notice the lady covered in blood parked right outside their secret hideout, following closely behind them, then standing on a hill near their mansion somehow invisible to the armed lookouts she’s scoping.

There’s a self surgery scene, but it’s just a knife wound, so we don’t get the traditional clinking of the removed slug. The funny part is when she says a surgeon can’t be tired so she makes coffee, pours Diet Coke into the coffee and then uses it to wash down two No-Doz. A regular Nancy Thompson over here.

There were actually a couple other people in the theater with me so I tried not to laugh too much, but at times I felt it was MOONFALL-level dumb. There’s an odd turn (later explained by a ludicrous plot twist) where early in her quest to rescue her daughter she unexpectedly finds her in a guy’s trunk. So she brings her home… then immediately leaves her alone, at which point she disappears again and then Nikki narrates that it was a mistake to leave her alone. By this point we’re also following the police who are investigating her vigilante rampage, and know who she is because they traced the car key she left in the guy’s eye. There are multiple baffling touches in that scene, but my favorite is that a rookie (can’t find him on IMDb either) suggests they check at her house, listed on her “driving license” as he calls it, and Captain Michaels (D.B. Sweeney, TAKEN 2) asks if he really thinks a trained killer would go home when she knows the police are looking for her. When he says yeah, maybe, the Captain says, “Congratulations rookie, you got your first stake out assignment.” I think he thinks it’s a brilliant idea, maybe he’s being sarcastic, but either way it’s clear that up to this point he did not bother to have anyone check the home of the person he’s after for killing 13 human traffickers.

Actually I’m not sure if that’s my favorite part because there’s also the part where they mention Ben, the guy who drugged and abducted Chloe, and a detective says she knows him, some low level dirt bag, has several “human trafficking violations.”

When it cut to a GoPro-shot scene of the SWAT team coming after Nikki I momentarily mistook it for one of the flashbacks to her military excursions in The Middle East. Yeah, it all blends together. Accidental wokeness.

The bad guys are called The Syndicate, the top guy is called The Chairman (Gabriel Sloyer, BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99), and he says that half the police are on his payroll. But as far as we see these particular cops aren’t corrupt, they’re just idiots. The movie’s attitude actually seems to be kind of anti-cop in that they get shown up by the military guys, especially Matthew Modine as Colonel Joseph Lavelle, the 99 Cent Store Colonel Trautman (beret and all). He’s her mentor, he shows up to hype up her deadliness to the cops and try to talk to her over a walkie talkie when she beats up the SWAT team after her and calls in telling them to send six ambulances. Instead of getting a face-to-face emotional breakdown scene with her like in FIRST BLOOD, this Colonel switches to the role of the psychiatrist at the end of PSYCHO who explains the outlandish ending.

I’ve read that Grünberg lives in Mexico, which I definitely hadn’t heard when LAST BLOOD came out. I remember at the time I got some pushback on my criticisms of the movie for depicting the same racist border propaganda that Trump was pushing in his campaign. Unfortunately current events prove that I was even more obviously right to be worried about it than I obviously was at the time. Thankfully I think PROTECTOR tries to distance itself from the border stuff, emphasizing that this group works domestically, but of course they still made the leaders Latino. Kinda funny to be stuck still pushing that fear of the other during this time of Epstein revelations.

I think this is stupider than is normal for this subgenre, but that’s better than being mediocre. I will remember it more than some movies that might be more reasonable but not really better. And it’s genuinely impressive to me that Jovovich can star in a movie this ridiculous and still come out looking cool in the end. That’s some kind of magic. For her next trick I’d like to see her do an actually great action movie.

p.s. She’s not really that much of a protector, she’s more of a retriever. But it would be kinda funny if it was called THE PROTECTOR just to add even more confusion between the Tony Jaa one and the Jackie Chan one.