Entertainment
Milla Jovovich Goes Full ‘Taken’ in New Thriller That’s as Absurd as It Is Brutal
Protector, the new action film starring Milla Jovovich as a soldier who must rescue her kidnapped daughter from sex traffickers, is one of the most oddly structured thrillers in recent memory. Though the logline clearly establishes the film as a gender-swapped Taken — which you’d think would be a straightforward affair — Protector makes some bold plays in its storytelling, including the omission of a crucial event in its own narrative and a twisty ending that recontextualizes the entire movie.
Handled artfully, these decisions could have helped Protector stand out in a crowded, low-budget action movie field. Unfortunately, director Adrian Grünberg (Rambo: Last Blood, Get the Gringo), working from a script by Bong-Seob Mun, isn’t able to wrangle these elements well enough to put them to effective use. As a result, Protector ends up feeling too generic for most of its runtime before becoming baffling when it attempts to catch the viewer off guard in its closing scenes.
What Is ‘Protector’ About?
In Protector, Jovovich plays Nikki Halsted, a special-forces soldier who has largely missed out on her daughter Chloe’s (Isabel Myers) life because she’s been busy serving her country overseas. When her husband becomes ill and dies, Nikki returns home permanently to finish raising her teenage daughter. There’s some resentment on Chloe’s end, since mom wasn’t around a lot while she was growing up, and Chloe sneaks out on her 16th birthday to hit up a local bar with her friends. Turns out, those friends absolutely suck at their job, because they quickly exit, leaving Chloe alone with a cute boy she met at the bar. One spiked drink later, and Chloe has been abducted by a human-trafficking ring known as “The Syndicate” (who are presumably a different entity from Mission: Impossible‘s anti-IMF force by the same name).
Nikki arrives just in time to witness the tail-end of the kidnapping and is forced to pull a Liam Neeson to rescue her kidnapped daughter. After taking out the first group of traffickers (one via a car key to the eye — a nifty bit of gore), she follows the trail to a Syndicate-controlled brothel named Club 30, where she … well, we don’t exactly know what she does here because the movie never bothers to show us. Thanks to some exposition and a few quick frames of flashback footage, we know she burned the place down (catching the attention of the local police) and gleaned enough info to continue her pursuit. It’s a bizarre omission, as part of the fun of this kind of movie is watching the hero travel from point A to B to C on their mission of revenge. Protector cuts point A from the movie and picks up at point B, with Nikki setting the timer on her wristwatch because she knows the trail will grow cold at 72 hours.
Now, there are some late-stage plot reveals that could account for why the filmmakers decided to omit an event that seems like it should have been a major set piece, but even once you have that information as a viewer, it’s still hard to parse a specific set of rules the movie follows to tell its story. On the whole, you get the sense that Grünberg and his team were throwing various ideas at the wall just to see what might stick, while, at the same time, trying to stay within the film’s small budget. At one point, Jovovich successfully fights off six armed SWAT team members, which I would have liked to have seen, but that also happens off-screen.
Milla Jovovich Still Has Action-Heroine Chops
If there’s any reason to watch Protector, it’s most likely for Jovovich, whose action-star cred doesn’t suffer at all here. Though she’s now 50, you buy the long-time Resident Evil star taking down rooms full of bad guys as she frantically searches for her daughter. She seems committed to the stuntwork. There’s a fun little bit where she quickly puts in a mouthguard before ramming her car into a convoy of vehicles she’s pursuing. She even provides voice-over narration throughout the film in an attempt to keep the story on track. Sometimes this works, like when she tells the viewer that “pain is temporary, infections are not” while stitching up a nasty gash after a fight. Other times, it feels a little desperate, like when the movie opens with her explaining “the logistics of death” directly to the camera — a scene that might have had more of an impact had it been presented in one take without cuts.
When Protector takes its focus off of Jovovich, it really starts to suffer. Way too much time is devoted to a subplot where the local police department decides to ignore the massive sex trafficking ring in the city to instead focus on capturing — and maybe even killing — Nikki. It’s a bizarre bit of side-storytelling that only makes sense if … well, you can probably figure that out on your own. What’s really funny is that the movie knows you’re going to be ahead of it here, so it eventually and abruptly wraps that subplot up with the bare minimum of fuss.
The supporting cast is largely unnotable. The villains, with names like “The Butcher” and “The Chairman,” are of the stock action-movie variety from start to finish. Matthew Modine (Stranger Things, Full Metal Jacket) shows up in a small role as Nikki’s former commander, and it seems like he was only brought on board in an attempt to provide some gravitas to the film’s late-stage plot twist. It’s fair to say he’s done much better work elsewhere.
‘Protector’ Forgets that Revenge Movies Should Be Fun to Watch
In addition, Protector is just an ugly movie. And I don’t mean that it’s ugly to look at (though it’s true that many of its fight scenes are dark and uninspiring). It’s ugly in that it never misses a chance to have a character call Nikki a “bitch” or refer to trafficked victims as “livestock.” Doing those things once or twice to reinforce that these are not good people who Nikki is going up against is fine. But doing them over and over again shows a lack of imagination, and it becomes wearying to the point where there’s little fun to be had in watching Protector. Revenge movies should be fun, and it should be an enjoyable experience watching Jovovich viciously strike back at those who have done her wrong.
But Protector spends way too much of its time recycling the most basic of action movie tropes. And by the time it attempts something different, pivoting the story to present Nikki as less of a standard-action movie badass and more of a psychologically flawed superhero who’d feel at home in M. Night Shyamalan‘s Unbreakable universe, the credits are about to roll. Either the twist needed to come earlier, or the filmmakers needed to do a better job of making sure it provided enough of a jolt to make the previous, largely generic 85 minutes worth the effort. As it stands, Protector‘s twist ending feels adrift in a movie that’s not compelling enough to support it.
Protector comes to theaters on March 6.
Protector
- Release Date
-
March 6, 2026
- Runtime
-
92 minutes
- Director
-
Adrian Grünberg
- Writers
-
Mun-Bong Seub
- Milla Jovovich has still got action-heroine chops at age 50.
- Protector wallows in generic revenge-thriller tropes and leaves too much of its action off-screen.
- The film’s oddly structed plotting only becomes more head-scratching once a twist ending is deployed.