Protector
                                                                                                                     
Director: Adrian Grunberg
Year: 2025
Rating: 5.5
Good to see that Milla Jovovich can kill more than zombies. Worse scum. Human traffickers. They have become the cinematic villains that everyone hates. There is no outcry from the public that the film is being unfair to human traffickers. Safe ground. This is a lot of Taken with a shot of Rambo and an echo of Jacob's Ladder. But at least they have a gender switch and it is a mother saving her daughter. The director Adrian Grünberg actually also directed Rambo: Last Blood in which Rambo saves his niece from a Mexican cartel. I have not seen that, but it sounds a lot like this one, but hopefully more competently made than this film. This is basically a mess with some strong action scenes along the way. That is when they are on the screen. There are a few action scenes that are off screen, we just hear about them. Sort of a strange thing to do for an action movie. But the twist ending perhaps explains why. But I hated the ending.



Milla goes completely unglamorous here, looking her fifty years. She has been an elite soldier trained in 100 ways how to kill. She finally retires to take care of her sixteen-year-old daughter. The damn kid sneaks out one night to be with friends and is kidnapped though Milla tried to stop them. And bang, the next thing we know, she is tied up, hanging upside down in a warehouse by the Syndicate. Her psycho jailer tells us that she burnt down a brothel and killed a bunch of guys. Ok. Would have been nice to see that but there is a lot of killing ahead. One tip to anyone who is a jailer in a situation like this. Don't stick a knife into the leg of your prisoner and walk away. The cops come after her as well until Matthew Modine does the Richard Crenna role from Rambo and warns the cops to stay away from her unless they want to die. The other odd thing about this is that Milla has all these internal monologues in order to explain to the not so bright audience members what she is planning. Good action in an otherwise bad film. But you have to like a woman who says I am going to kill all of your and follows through.