By Dan Skip Allen 

Revenge thrillers are a niche genre often lumped in with horror or the action genre. More often than not, they feature a woman trying to get back at a man who done them wrong. In “Protector” starring Mila Jovavitch, it’s more complicated than that, though. It’s about a problem that has been going on in this country for years now, but only recently has Hollywood caught on to the problem. Child abduction or human trafficking is an epidemic in this and many other countries. It lends itself to a revenge thriller perfectly because of what a parent or Guardian is willing to do to get their child back. That’s the case with this film.

Nikki (Mila Jovavitch) is a mother and a soldier. She is deployed overseas in the Middle East and misses a lot of her daughter, Cloe’s birthdays (Isabel Myers). After a tragedy strikes the family in the form of a savior illness to the father of her child and her husband, she has to come home to raise a now teenage daughter. Who has issues with her mother for being gone all of the time. On her latest birthday, she defies the orders of her mother and goes out to party with her friends. Unbeknownst to her, she was being watched by a scout for human traffickers. They drug and kidnap the teenage girl, which leads to an all-out search and rescue mission by the mother. She puts all the skills she learned as a US Special Forces Operative to use in trying to save her daughter. There is more to this conspiracy than meets the eye, though, as she finds out first hand.

One of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to movies is you as a director. In this case, Adrian Grinberg, you have to give the audience something to look at that they can at least get behind. This movie fails in that regard. The camera work regarding the cinematography is terrible. I could barely see what was going on, especially at night time. I’ve had bad theater experiences where projectors didn’t work right and so forth, but this situation wasn’t that at all. It was just bad cinematography by Vern Nobles Jr. With all the incredible cameras available these days, I’m shocked that any movie looked this bad. Maybe it was a budgetary issue. Who knows?

A second problem I had with this film was the story as a whole. I liked the narrative leading towards an acceptable midway point in the story. I thought things worked out well. Then the film went on for another 45 minutes or so. I think when you have a story like this, you need to make the main story end satisfactorily at the end of the movie, not in the middle. The overall story excluding subplots was one that I did like until it ended abruptly in the middle of the movie. That 3rd if you were never going to draw me in after the main story added the way it did. It definitely didn’t have a great script but an okay one. This filmmaker and writer needs to learn from this mistake.

Mila Jovavitch is an actress who got off of the gate fast with films like The 5th Element and Messenger the Story of Joan of Arc. She even held down her own horror franchise, Resident Evil. She worked with her husband, Paul WS Anderson,  quite a bit, though, to her detriment. She started to make bad decisions regarding the roles she took. Maybe she was recommended for specific roles from people in the industry or liked the script, but she does not have many good films that have come out from a critical point of view. That’s why a lot of people haven’t been happy with her lately. We have had more hope for her as an actress, but she’s been in movies like this that have dragged her career down. That’s a sad state of affairs. 

Besides Jovavitch, there is a decent supporting cast that has Matthew Modine in the Colonel Troutman (Richard Crenna) role. This was the friend of John Rambo in First Blood that came to his defense against the police. Modine plays a similar role to that for Jovavitch’s character. Both Don Harvey and DB Sweeney play villains in the story. One is a corrupt detective, and the other is the facilitator of the human trafficking ring. They are both very clichéd in many ways. I’ve seen these types of characters a million times in films like this one. Africa Himmel plays a girl who is rescued by the Jovavitch character in her fight against these evil depraved people. Similar to Jovavitch, the rest of this cast can’t help this film or story. Oscar winning actors couldn’t save this film, let alone c tier actors in Hollywood. 

“Protector” is a film that had potential from a story and acting point of view but eventually falls short of expectations due to technical issues and a subpar script. Jovavitch did a good job to try and save this film, but even she couldn’t save the sinking ship of the movie that this one is. I go into every movie with open eyes and ears and give them all an equal chance, but this one never got out of the starting gates for me. Some films shouldn’t be made and this was one of them. It’s not very good at all. In the hands of a better director, it may have had a chance but not this one. This will go down as one of the worst movies of 2026. The good thing is they’ll be many more to wash the taste of this one out of my mouth.

1 star