The Protégé: Der Racheengel

It's a pretty decent assassin seeking revenge story, we all know the drill as we've all seen a million of them.

Maggie Q is who she is in everything, and is always good at it.

Michael Keaton was surprisingly good, but I'm always surprised he can act, despite his long and varied career.

The story was the weak point, but as it was a bog-standard revenge story with an extremely obvious twist at the end, that isn't surprising or even a particular detriment.

You've seen most of this before, brutality, revenge, rich people. I liked the cat and mouse chemistry between Keaton and Q despite the age difference. A good throwback feel.

While the Protege is a somewhat forgettable, typical action thriller movie, it's two leads do a great job. Maggie and Michael are both very charismatic in the movie, and do not phone in their performances. Samuel L Jackson is also good, but his performance is a little more phoned in than our other leads. The action is very good, with realistic hand to hand combat and decent gun play. While it's not the best action in a movie, it's definitely choreographed well and shot competently. I would mainly recommend this movie for Maggie and Michaels performances alone, along with the action scenes. However, if you're not interested in that you can probably skip this movie and not miss anything.

Initially I was thrilled about getting to sit down to watch "The Protége" from writer Richard Wenk and director Martin Campbell, but someone had mentioned that the movie wasn't really all that great. So it was with a bit of doubt that I sat down to watch "The Protége". Regardless of how it was playing out, then I would watch it, as the movie had a rather nice cast ensemble.

And I must say that I am glad that I opted to watch the movie, because I happened to enjoy the movie. This was a good old fashioned action crime thriller, for better or worse. Sure, the storyline and plot may have been predictable and somewhat generic, but who cares? It made for good wholesome entertainment.

The storyline is easily followed and doesn't really require all that much in the intellectual department, so you just switch off the old gray and lean back and enjoy the movie. And yeah, that was actually a good thing about the movie, because it is a munch-on-the-popcorn-and-enjoy-the-action kind of movie.

"The Protége" has a good cast ensemble. And truth be told, of course I had to watch "The Protége" given the fact that Maggie Q was starring in it, as she tends to make some pretty decent action movies. And she was nicely cast for "The Protége", I will say that much. And it certainly was nice to have the likes of Michael Keaton and Samuel L. Jackson in a movie such as this as well.

There is a good amount of action and fight scenes throughout the course of "The Protége", which definitely help bring the movie up and into a good pacing.

I was adequately entertained by "The Protége", and it is a movie well-worth watching if you like action crime thrillers.

My rating of "The Protége" lands on a six out of ten stars.

'The Protégé' was a perfectly fine simple action film up to an hour into it.

After that, the characters were just set loose. I was unable to understand why was anyone doing what they were doing. Every character's motivation was beyond me. What was the point of Jackson's fakeout? Why did Maggie Q and Keaton have a Mr. & Mrs. Smith dynamic but not really? Why does Jackson give moral speeches to people before the assassinations, this seems just a little hypocritical? Why did Maggie Q want a normal life in peace when she clearly had one and she never showed any signs of discontent with her murdering lots of people for money (it was more like she enjoyed it)? Barely anything makes sense in this film.

In the end, it seemed like Moody was the main villain and not some generic corrupt businessman. I mean, he never cared for the hacker kid who got steamed because of him, or his maid, he was perfectly fine with dead bodies piling up.

The thing is if you want to write in a twist - do so. Something stupid happening can't be a twist by itself. You can trick a viewer by showing him/her what you want, but not the characters of your film, it just doesn't work like that. The viewer assumes that if something affected a character's motivation - this actually happened.

Overall, 'The Protégé' feels like a moderately budgeted action film with a couple of big names filmed in cheaper and convenient countries with no-name extras. And this works alright until the characters become sentient and just do whatever they want at the moment.