Protector: Milla Jovovich as a Badass Mom Bent on Vengeance

By Chris Knight

Rating: B+

I have a colleague who jokes that the only films he likes to watch are those in which a middle-aged father rescues his child from some unspeakable evil. Well, Rob, if you’re reading this, have I got a film for your wife.

Milla Jovovich (Resident Evil: Too Many Chapters to Name) stars as Nikki Halstead, whom someone in the film refers to as a “special forces super badass,” and someone else as just a mother searching for a lost child.

She’s both. As the opening montage in Protector explains, Nikki is mom to daughter Chloe, but also part of America’s fighting forces invading the Middle East. (That may sound a little on the nose for a film that finished filming last spring, but when was America not poised to invade the Middle East?)

Home at last after the death of her husband, Nikki celebrates Chloe’s 16th birthday with her, but that night her daughter slips away with friends — and is promptly abducted by human traffickers. (The opening montage primed us for this as well, toggling between foreign wars and domestic slavery.)

What follows is 72 hours of female-driven revenge-porn fantasy. Nikki almost stops her daughter’s kidnappers from the get-go, but they manage to evade her lethal wrath. (Well, some of them do.) Realizing that the first three days are vital in recovering a victim, she then straps a big ol’ countdown timer on her wrist and starts hunting bad guys.

It’s simple stuff, plot-wise, but decently presented by director Adrian Grunberg, who also made Rambo: Last Blood. Less effective is Bong-Seob Mun’s screenplay, where the grammar tends toward the lowest comma denominator. (Also, the last time I heard the term “whorehouse” tossed around this much, Dolly Parton was running the Chicken Ranch down in Texas.)

Protector metes out satisfying vengeance and painful setbacks like clockwork, with a few fun asides. When Nikki goes into a hardware store and emerges with a five-point harness and a skateboard, you know she’s up to something but have to wait ‘til the next scene to find out what.

And there’s a gruesome irony in the lesson that, if an enemy sticks a knife in you — now you’ve got a knife!

Jovovich carries the show, ably assisted by a solid cast of (secondary) men, including Don Harvey as a mid-level kidnapper, D.B. Sweeney as a bent police captain, and Matthew Modine as Lavelle, an Army colonel who was Nikki’s CO overseas and has her best interests at heart. Oh, and Gabriel Sloyer as the final boss, whom I really hoped would be more of a challenge.

They all push the story along for just over 90 minutes, with Nikki melding the tenacity and indestructibility of a Terminator and Cocaine (Mama) Bear. Or whatever the feminine form of Liam Neeson’s Taken franchise would be. Takenne? Takenix?

Regardless, if you want proof that hell hath no fury like an angry mom, look no further.

Protector. Directed by Adrian Grunberg. Starring Milla Jovovich, Don Harney, Matthew Modine, and Gabriel Sloyer. In theatres March 6.