The Protégé (2021)

Martin Campbell's The Protégé arrives as a brisk, competent revenge thriller, the kind of picture that knows exactly what it is and declines to apologize. Maggie Q plays Anna, a contract killer raised from childhood by the legendary assassin Moody, here embodied by Samuel L. Jackson with his customary ease. The picture assembles a notably varied principal cast for a 2021 action outing: a Vietnamese-born heroine, a Black mentor, a slippery Irish-American antagonist in Michael Keaton. None of this is remarked upon. The film simply casts well and moves on, which is its own quiet virtue and also the extent of its ambition on that front.

Anna out-fights, out-thinks and out-shoots nearly every man who crosses her path, and the role was originally conceived for Gong Li, a detail that suggests the filmmakers understood what they had. Still, this is the empowerment the genre has traded in for decades, competence as spectacle, no thesis attached. The villains are rich men with criminal empires and fortified mansions, and the film treats their wealth as set dressing for the third act instead of a target for argument. Money is the backdrop. It is never the point.

What the film does not contain is equally instructive. There is no romantic or political instruction, no sermonizing, no environmental conscience, no advocacy of any kind. A disabled character surfaces late as a plot mechanism and vanishes back into the machinery, which is callous but not commentary. The Da Nang backstory provides texture and a location, not a reckoning with empire or race. The result is a lean, old-fashioned genre exercise, pleasant enough, forgettable in the way that most competent thrillers are. It wants nothing from us but our attention for ninety minutes, and it returns that attention with professional courtesy. In an era of cinema that frequently lectures its audience on how to feel, this film simply asks us to watch. There is something almost restful in that.