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. (read the rest of this shit…)
You remember Rambo, John J. Vietnam vet, Green Beret, POW camp survivor, Congressional Medal of Honor recipient. In ’81, as a homeless drifter, he waged a one-man guerrilla war against the police department of Hope, Washington, wounding several officers, killing police dogs, blowing up buildings and causing one officer to die from falling out of a helicopter. But they let him out of prison for a secret POW rescue mission. Though he earned a presidential pardon, he decided to live in Thailand, living off odd jobs such as stickfighter, temple-builder, snake-catcher or river guide, with occasional missions to help the Mujahideen in Afghanistan or rescue missionaries in Myanmar. But eventually he came home to his dad’s place in Arizona.
