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Smith dynamic on the two that not only severely undercuts their believability as professional killers but also leads to the truly horrific line: “You point a gun at my pussy, and then you ask me to bed. While some viewers may celebrate the arrival of Keaton’s Rembrandt, a fixer for criminals situated as Anna’s equal on the bad guy’s team, that celebration would be premature. Only the lucky ones make it out alive.” It’s particularly disappointing for a film led by a Vietnamese American actor to fall down so hard in its Vietnamese representation.īond Director on What Modern Action Movies Get Wrong By Don Kaye One need look no further for how the film feels about its setting than the following line delivered by Patrick’s Billy Boy: “Vietnam has always been a place of death. Rather than delve into the rich texture of Da Nang, one of the Vietnam’s biggest cities, The Protégé uses the city as a backdrop to be coded with colonialist assumptions of danger and lawlessness.

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Yet despite a large chunk of this movie is both set and filmed in Vietnam, the film’s world is populated almost entirely by American characters, including a Da Nang-based biker gang headed by Robert Patrick and composed of other white men. Thirty years later, when Moody is killed by a mysterious Big Bad, Anna goes back to Vietnam to find his killer and becomes tied up in a convoluted conspiracy. In The Protégé, Q stars as Anna, a Vietnamese assassin found by hitman Moody (Jackson) as a child and trained to join the found family business. Jackson, and Michael Keaton are goddamn professionals. The answer is a lot, because Maggie Q, Samuel L. The Protégé is an exercise in casting several charismatic actors and seeing how many terrible tropes can be piled on top of them before the performers break under the clichés’ weight. Unfortunately, a terrible script results in a 109-minute reminder of just how good Q’s underrated action TV series Nikita truly was, and just how much kinder action TV has been to women than the world of action movies in the last decade. The film pairs Casino Royale director Martin Campbell with proven action hero Maggie Q, and it should be a shoe-in for a good time.

This is probably because there has traditionally been less money to be made on TV, so the rich, mostly white men who rule Hollywood have left TV to a slightly more diverse crowd of behind-the-scenes talent to tell slightly more diverse-especially on less “important” platforms like The CW.Īction flick The Protégé, released in theaters last weekend, tells this story too well. The TV landscape has always been ahead of movies when it comes to giving women-and other underrepresented identities-a shot. This article contains minor spoilers for The Protégé and Nikita.

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