The Protégé hits theaters on Aug. 20.
On paper, The Protégé has all the makings of a slick, sexy action thriller with a strong emotional core. In practice, it’s a black hole that consumes any hint of tension, chemistry, and excitement, which is downright shocking when you consider who’s involved and how familiar this territory is for them. Director Martin Campbell helmed Casino Royale. Maggie Q starred in Nikita. Samuel L. Jackson played Shaft. Michael Keaton is Michael Keaton. The Protégé, however, feels like it was assembled from filmed rehearsals on set, with everyone simply going through the motions and reserving their talents for the next proper take. The result is an anti-reel — an inverse-calling card for every participant, all of whom have proven time and time again that they could pull this off in their sleep. You have to try extra hard to mess up a sure thing that’s as sure as this.
The film follows Anna (Q), an international assassin trained by world-class killer Moody (Jackson), who once rescued her in her native Vietnam, and is now her partner on high-paying hit-jobs. Their interactions with each other are warm and easygoing, but they work with cold-blooded, clockwork precision. When Moody is attacked one night, Anna is forced to trace his assailants back to her home country, where she begins to untangle a web from Moody’s past as mysterious clean-up killer Rembrandt (Keaton), with whom she shares a connection, weaves in and out of her story.
These sound like the ingredients for a good time, but each one curdles rapidly.
Moody and Anna’s supposedly father-daughter dynamic is certainly pleasant, but the way overhearing a conversation at a restaurant is pleasant. It might pique curiosity, and it may even provide clues as to what these people are like behind closed doors, though it offers little more than that. The problem is that most of Anna and Moody’s scenes are private, and intimate, and their dialogue constantly hints at a much more deep and loving relationship than what we’re shown, and not because they’re particularly restrained as people. Rather, they speak as if they’ve been handed topics for small talk before entering a room.
This stiltedness permeates the rest of the film, especially when Keaton’s character enters the fray. Rembrandt carries himself suavely when he first meets Anna — who moonlights as an antique book salesman — but when their dialogue turns to flirtation, something feels deeply off. Both Q and Keaton speak at a rapid-fire pace, but neither one seems to consider or react to the other’s advances — at least, not in the shots that made it to the screen. As the film goes on, their attempts to balance lust and animosity get lost in a haphazard edit that can only seem to conceive of human behaviour as what’s being said in words, rather than why those words are being said, or what conversations are being had by people’s body language and lingering glances. There’s probably a much more passionate version of their scenes together somewhere on the cutting room floor.
After a while, it begins to feel like a VeggieTales reenactment of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, with anything remotely risqué ripped out in favour of something absurdly conservative. These are characters who simultaneously want to kill and screw each other, played by actors who are more than capable of radiating appeal — all they need to do is show up — but they seem to want to be on camera less than the cast of Movie 43. It’s like watching gold be turned to lead. The closest thing The Protégé has to sex scenes is a fight sequence that briefly threatens to become sensual, and a shot of two naked characters hidden under a blanket after they’ve done the deed off-screen. The movie was rated R, though clearly not for its sexuality.
You would think the violence makes up for the film’s lack of, well, anything of note, but even the action feels limp, and there isn’t much of it that stands out beyond the first few scenes. It has one single sequence, involving Keaton fighting his way through a crowded market, where the punches have “oomph” and the environment feels like it’s part of the story — also known as the baseline for action in a visual medium. But for the most part, every bit of fight choreography feels designed for minimum impact. It’s edited to feel sluggish, and the camera rarely, if ever, moves in a way that captures momentum. The action’s closest aesthetic cousin is the recently released Beckett, though that film’s fights were intentionally sloppy since it featured an everyman on the run, not trained martial artists.
As for the story, it could have taken place anywhere in the world without changing much. That’s a problem too, and not just because its spaces are mostly nondescript hallways that do little to enhance the action. Anna hasn’t been back to Vietnam since she was 12. It’s both her homeland and a place that holds painful memories, but when she first gets off the plane, the film captures this monumentally important moment… via a wide shot of Anna placing her luggage in the trunk of a cab. In The Protégé, plot logistics are so much more important than emotions that they consume any semblance of story. One short glance out the window later, and Anna is back to tracking down Person A for Reason B in Location C, none of which are given any emotional context until the film decides to retroactively explain them nearly an hour into its 100-minute runtime. This is still somehow preferable to how and when the film dramatizes Anna’s trauma (hint: it doesn’t factor into the story at all, despite her returning home).
Anna and Moody have the occasional chat about the morality of their job — whether they’re killing the right people, and for the right reasons — but they never actually wrestle with what they do. Every moral question the film presents is neatly categorized into black or white shortly thereafter. Even Anna’s mission into Moody’s past presents her with a difficult tightrope, where she theoretically has to balance her professional instincts with her desire for revenge, but this is yet another emotional thread the film seems to drop (which is especially a shame, since Q did a remarkable job navigating a similar journey on Designated Survivor as a CIA agent hunting down the terrorists who killed the man she loved).
The one thing the film has going for it is that it knows the value of stuffing the frame with vehicles and practical debris on occasion, but the most interesting thing that happens on screen is when Anna’s library of rare and expensive books gets shot to shreds. It looks fantastic, and given the way it’s set up early on, it even carries a semblance of emotional weight — but of course, the film quickly moves onto the next thing without looking back, the same way it hops and skips from each plot point to the next without much care for emotional coherence. The world it creates feels neither fun nor dangerous, despite presenting brief hints of a John Wick-like network of secret code words and professions within professions. Few ideas in the film, whether physical or emotional, last beyond the moment they’re introduced.
What else is there to say? It’s a nothing film, whose action ought to be exciting and whose dialogue and interpersonal dynamics ought to be rife with emotional and/or sexual tension. But the words are just words, and the fights are less interesting than watching paint dry. It’s really no fun at all.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/37ZpJSM
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