After her mentor is murdered, Anna, an assassin, must return to Vietnam to track down his killer.
The poster for Martin Campbell’s “The Protégé” proudly proclaims: “From the studio that brought you ‘John Wick’.” Imagine “John Wick” stripped of its humor, elegance, minimalism, and blood-splatter-verging-on-poetry, and you’ll have a pretty clear idea of what to expect from “The Protégé.” A by-the-books revenge tale that muddies the plot with dumb, uninvolving complications, it tries to mask its shallowness with all-too-familiar stylistic flourishes and a thick application of neon.
1991, Vietnam. When trained assassin Moody (Samuel L. Jackson, providing the sole, all-too-brief ray of warmth in an otherwise cold-as-steel film) discovers young Anna (Eva Nugyen Thorsen), the sole survivor of a massacre, he decides to train her in his assassin ways. Thirty years later, Moody hasn’t aged a bit, and the two of them are now partner assassins, based in London — although Moody’s feeling a bit rough (a character coughing is never a good sign in any film, sort of like the introduction of a gun in the first act).
Luckily, before whatever disease eating away at Moody takes him slowly and painfully, he’s gunned down swiftly and mercilessly by a bunch of goons. Upon discovery, Anna (Maggie Q) embarks on a revenge quest to her country of birth. The charming killer Michael Rembrandt (Michael Keaton) shows up, taunting her, perhaps even taking a liking to her. After (somewhat forcefully) enlisting biker Billy Boy (Robert Patrick), Anna gets caught and tortured. And so the film goes: Anna makes a narrow escape — fight sequence — twist — character waxing poetic — fight sequence — twist — brutal finale… You get my drift.
The template is as basic as it gets; there’s no attempt to subvert or deconstruct the revenge flick, save for some lame stabs at sharp dialogue exchanges and pseudo-intellectual rumination. “You point the gun at my pussy and then you ask me to bed?” Anna asks Michael, while both of them have their weapons aimed at each other’s privates at a restaurant. Later, she states: “I’m going to find out who killed my friend… I’m going to end their lives, and anyone’s who stands in my way.” The whole thing’s sloppy, half-assed, to the point where “Vietnam” is clearly misspelled in one shot.
As for the action — what it all boils down to — it delivers… in spurts. You’d expect more from the man that made “Casino Royale” (another boastful claim on the film’s key art); Campbell is on cruise control here. Some scenes are striking purely due to their violence, whose relentlessness is praiseworthy, I guess, in the age of PG-13 bloodless gore-fests. An escape from what seems like a certain hanging marks one of the film’s highlights, as does seeing the almost-70-year-old Keaton duke it out in a restaurant kitchen, or bed the much younger Anna.
Oddly, the nucleus around which the action revolves, Maggie Q, delivers a somewhat stilted performance. I’d call it introverted if I were generous, but let’s face it — blank is blank. She’s overshadowed by almost every supporting cast member, including Keaton, who hams it up in a way that only Keaton can.
“It is a rare gift to have a friend who trusts you enough not to try and help until you ask,” Moody tells Anna at one point. I wish the filmmakers asked for some assistance when crafting this B-flick. Lacking coherence and insight, and led by a curiously expressionless heroine, “The Protégé” does, indeed, come off like a second-rate cinematic apprentice.
In Theaters Friday, August 20th
