The Reel Review
A former military special forces soldier living in Southern New Mexico goes on a momma bear killing rampage after her teenage daughter is kidnapped by a sex trafficking syndicate. Milla Jovovich and Isabel Myers star in this action crime/thriller.
Protector is a very cheap, third-rate knockoff of Liam Neeson’s Taken, which is frustrating given that Jovovich, after all of those Resident Evil films, is so convincing at all of the physical combat. The story by Bong-Seob Mun and directed by Adrian Grunberg, who helmed The Black Demon, our Worst Movie of 2023, is so sloppily written and edited that there are key scenes that don’t fit in the story – like the sudden appearance of the missing daughter. It’s as though the film editor quit halfway through the project.
D.B. Sweeney (Fire in the Sky) and Matthew Modine (And the Band Played On, Vision Quest) have minor roles in this feeble story with a twist that is so weak as to be laughable. For the love of God, will someone please give Jovovich a decent story to show off her physical combat skills? This feeble mess was not it, and without Jovovich’s solid performance it would have been a total failure.
REEL FACTS
• Born in December 1975 to a Serbian father and Ukrainian mother in Kyiv, when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, Milla Jovovich is fluent in English, Russian and French and understands Serbian and Ukrainian. The Resident Evil franchise is the highest-grossing film series to be based on video games, grossing more than a billion dollars. She and English filmmaker husband Paul W.S. Anderson have three children.
• Isabel Myers (Ravenswood, Grace of the Father) is the younger sister of actress Emma Myers (Wednesday).
• Protector was filmed in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
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