El Protegido

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.

'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.

There are some good action sequences in this Maggie Q vehicle that shows off her chops as a movie action star and her beauty. Unfortunately the story and script are rather generic, and the director hasn't made the best use of the exotic locations, with most of the film having a sound-stage feel. Michael Keaton is a great actor, but I found the casting of a 70-year-old white male actor as the love interest of a 40-year-old Asian woman very off. Hope Maggie Q gets the material she deserves one day.

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.

An enjoyable, undemanding action thriller. Well-paced, with some lovely scenery and some good action scenes. Some of the violence was unnecessarily gruesome. Maggie Q was good and is easy on the eyes, and Michael Keaton stole every scene he was in.