The Protégé

“The Protégé presents itself as a racially diverse film, and in broad strokes, that holds up.”

Title: The Protégé (2021)
Director: Martin Campbell 👨🏼🇬🇧
Writer: Richard Wenk 👨🏼🇺🇸

Reviewed by Roxana Hadadi 👩🏽🇺🇸

Note: This review was commissioned by Lionsgate. The content and methodology remain 100% independent and in line with Mediaversity's non-commissioned reviews.

—SPOILERS AHEAD—

Technical: 3/5

The lady-assassin movie has a certain formula, and The Protégé hits every element of it: A young woman without a family falls into a life of violence. She grows up to be gorgeous and lethal. Eventually, a job forces her to confront her past and she compromises her professionalism. Maggie Q (Nikita, Divergent, Designated Survivor) can play that character in her sleep, and as protagonist Anna in The Protégé, she brings the film to life. But the familiarity of this storyline bogs down the actress’ good work.

After a traumatic childhood left her an orphan, Anna was adopted and raised by assassin Moody (Samuel L. Jackson), and they become a family and a professional partnership based in London. But while celebrating his 70th birthday, Moody brings up an old job that went wrong. A man died, his son disappeared, and Moody has questions about what happened—and perhaps regrets. When Anna investigates, she’s caught in a web of conflicting interests and dangerous men, including the flirtatious Rembrandt (Michael Keaton). Her questions lead Anna back to Vietnam, where she faces her past.

Judged by its action scenes alone, The Protégé is an enjoyable time. Maggie Q gracefully flips, punches, shoots, and sprints, as director Martin Campbell allows her ample space to work. Anna’s cool, unimpressed affect works as backstory for a character who has seen everything and done everything on the job. But Richard Wenk’s script lets her down with gimmicky exchanges with other characters, most of them men. Interactions with Moody and Rembrandt invigorate the film, but the genre clichés packed into The Protégé ultimately overshadow her.

Gender: 3/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES, but barely

Anna is a highly effective assassin who has compartmentalized all aspects of her life. She works with father figure Moody in a profession that requires her to beat up, abduct, and kill men who are shocked by her physical strength and fighting prowess, and in those ways The Protégé does imbue Anna with the “strong female character” qualities commonly found in action films. However, she’s also painted with some stereotypically feminine characteristics as well: wearing stiletto heels; baking apple pies; and hanging out with her cat. As the owner of a rare bookstore as her day-job front, she enjoys flirting with the increasingly vulgar Rembrandt.

The Protégé works to make Anna seem quite singular, a sophisticated figure who men would enjoy punching them in the face. But while the film doesn’t quite fetishize or objectify her, it also fails to provide her with any interior depth. Because her personality is so defined by her relationship with Moody, the film seems a bit fuzzy about Anna’s own wants or desires past maintaining her bookstore and meeting a nice man.

Anna’s thinness as a character is worsened because she fails to connect with other female characters. She is friendly with a bookstore employee, with whom she discusses her cat—barely passing the Bechdel Test. Another exchange takes place with Moody’s housekeeper, who is gruesomely killed. But after Anna leaves London for Vietnam, she is surrounded by men who treat her either as a daughter or as an enemy. Anna lacks her own identity past “killing machine” while stuck between those extremes of paternalism and antagonism, at least until the film’s final scene: A flashback to her childhood uses sexual violence as an impetus for her actions.

After her parents and siblings are murdered in front of her by rebels, one of those insurgents takes Anna to a back room in the school her parents used to run. The scene’s blocking emphasizes how alone she is: a locked door, the older man sizing her up. Anna defends herself by stealing and using his gun to kill him, which could be construed by some as a strong moment of self-defense. But the implied threat of rape is a limiting way to develop a female character, and the suggestion that Anna doles out violence as revenge for her trauma feels simplistic.

Race: 3.5/5

The Protégé presents itself as a racially diverse film, and in broad strokes, that holds up. Maggie Q, born in Honolulu to a white father and Vietnamese immigrant mother, plays a similarly biracial character who forms a loving bond with Jackson’s Moody, who is Black. Protective towards Anna since the start, Moody has no second thoughts about rescuing this young girl from danger in violence-gripped Vietnam, even killing to ensure that they are able to cross the border. Later on, when she has grown into an adult, they are supportive and gently razz each other to show their affection. Maggie Q and Jackson elevate some tired writing (including a needlessly drawn-out joke about drones) and their performances support the film’s suggestion that you choose your family.

Although Anna and Moody ally with diverse (but almost uniformly male) characters, and face off against diverse (but almost uniformly male) characters, The Protégé also engages in some genre clichés regarding race. Two Black characters are killed within the film’s first 30 minutes, and although one of them is eventually brought back, he fakes his death by killing another Black man. The film’s presumed villain is also a Black man who audiences meet as he brutally murders a character with no preamble. Not to mention a scene where Anna’s ethnic background is treated with confusion: “Asian-Russian, you don’t really see that, ever.” If that was meant to be a commentary on Communism, the script doesn’t pull it off. Instead, the line sounds out-of-touch.

Finally, the film’s treatment of Vietnam raises some questions. The country is depicted as war-torn in 1991, when we first meet Moody and Anna, but the script doesn’t explain the rebels’ motivations or the many refugees attempting to leave the country. Vietnamese men enact scenes of grotesque violence, such as decapitating a woman, but the film is so nonspecific that you could mistake its time period for the Vietnam War. It’s a positive that an actress with Vietnamese ancestry was cast to play a character with the same background, but the film could have used more narrative finesse.

Deduction for Disability: -0.25

Anna travels to Vietnam to investigate the disappeared child who Moody was hired to defend in the ‘90s, and learns that the boy ended up in an orphanage. He has lived there as a patient for more than 20 years, and the adult Lucas (Dimitar Nikolov) does not like to be touched, cannot speak, and is blind. His father treats Lucas like a secret while anonymously paying for his care, and Moody uses his support of his son as a clue to unravel what went wrong with the job years before. Although Anna and the nuns who care for Lucas treat him with empathy, the film uses Lucas like a puzzle piece rather than a three-dimensional character.

Mediaversity Grade: C 3.08/5

The Protégé doesn’t reinvent the wheel for this subgenre. Its overly complicated plot relies on narrative switchbacks, fake deaths, and split loyalties, and its gorgeous female protagonist can beat up bigger guys without breaking a sweat. The film’s entertainment value is in its serviceable pacing, which is supported by Maggie Q’s effortless action scenes. But its lack of detail about its international setting and a hokey script fail to elevate The Protégé enough to match Maggie Q’s commitment.

Like The Protégé? Try these other titles featuring female assassins.

Grade: CLiAugust 29, 2021