The Protege - A Gritty Action Thriller Movie

In my last holiday trip, I was on long connecting flights for around 17 hours which gave me plenty of time to enjoy the inflight entertainment. And in the Emirates Airline, there were tons of movies that somehow I have not seen, so I spent a lot of time watching several of them. This was one of those films that I wanted to write as it was quite new and just released on one of the streaming platform last week. Well here's more to it.

Brief Story Line

Anna (Maggie Q - Fantasy Island, Divergent movies etc) was a professional contract killer raised from childhood by her mentor Moody (Samuel L. Jackson - Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard, Incredibles 2 etc). As a cover for her main work, Anna opened a rare books shop in London where she got acquainted with a mysterious guy named Michael Rembrandt (Michael Keaton - American Assassin, Dumbo live version etc). 

After asking Anna to search for someone related to Moody's past assignment, he was found murdered by unknown people. Anna decided to take matters into her own hand as she looked for the persons responsible for Moody's murder.

So how would the story conclude? You can find out in this movie.

End of Brief Story Line

Like the usual action thriller movie, this one had the quite standard formula where the protagonist was an intelligent person, well versed in martial arts and weaponry but had to fight a large army of bad guys by herself. This time though, the story was actually pretty interesting even if it might be a bit simple. I like that it was not made too complicated. There was a bit of supposed twist that was somehow not that surprising for me (probably due to watching too many movies). 

The thing that made this movie interesting was the chemistry between the lead stars Maggie Q, Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Keaton as it was such a joy to watch. Anna and Moody's relationship was really convincing from the beginning with the young Anna (played by Eva Nguyen Thorsen). While Anna and Rembrandt's obvious attraction to one another was also interesting (that scene in the hotel room in Vietnam was fun). Aside from those 3 names, there were also few other support characters like Edward Hayes (David Rintoul - The Ghost Writer, Game of Thrones TV series etc) and Billy Boy (Robert Patrick - The Peacemaker TV series, Scorpion TV series etc). 

As an action thriller, I thought this one was entertaining enough. The action sequence was adequately done with Maggie Q showing up some nice moves (reminded me of her ability and agility in Nikita TV series). To my surprise, another person also showed some good fight skills. The movie was directed by Martin Campbell whose works I was quite familiar with, such as The Foreigner, Casino Royale, The Mask of Zorro and many more. Which was probably the reason this film did not have that very strong B movie, but just gritty. I noticed that even the critics were not so harsh and it got a mixed review. 

For around 104 minutes, we got to see some nice action and there were few violent moments as well that would explain the R rating and 18+ in HBO Go. There was no age restriction while watching it in the inflight entertainment. Overall this was an OK action thriller movie starring few well known names and directed by experienced action films director with a simple story and a pretty satisfying conclusion (though I did not really capture that last scene cause my plane already landed, until I re-watched it). So if you are interested, you can give this a try while you are on a flight with Emirates Airline or via HBO Go.

Mike's movie moments rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars