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Protector breaks through the glass ceiling of bloodthirsty Taken knock-offs

Sleazy and cheap, the fearmongering get-your-kid-back action film at least stars Milla Jovovich.

By Jacob Oller  |  March 6, 2026 | 11:00am
Photo: Magenta Light Studios
Film Reviews Milla Jovovich
Protector breaks through the glass ceiling of bloodthirsty Taken knock-offs

What’s up with conservatives and human trafficking? Perhaps it’s a trickle-down terror derived from conspiracies of an international Epsteinian cabal composed of left-center elites. Perhaps it’s just a convenient crime to pin on suspicious foreigners. Or maybe it’s simply the most evil thing they can imagine, the scariest thing for men who identify as Fathers Of Daughters, the thing that would drive them most quickly to violence. What separates Protector from the QAnon-drenched Sound Of Freedom or the film’s obvious inspiration, Taken, is that it’s not a father, but a Mother Of A Daughter, who unleashes her particular set of skills upon masses of nefarious henchmen. The other main difference is that the lead isn’t played by an otherwise unemployable nut or a graying star slumming it in the genre world. Instead, it’s Milla Jovovich who snarls, stabs, and dual-wields her way through this grim copy of a copy, breaking the glass ceiling of who can star in one of these bloodthirsty parental nightmare-fantasies.

Directed by Adrian Grünberg (Rambo: Last Blood, Get The Gringo), Protector fits snugly into the niche he’s carved out for himself. His terrible final Rambo movie is almost the same beat-for-beat single-killing-machine rampage against sex traffickers, more explicit in its depiction of Mexico as an alien hellhole but just as explicit in its provocations: What if your teen daughter got snatched because you took your eyes off her for one second? And then she was tortured, injected with heroin, and, despite your most murderous efforts, didn’t make it? The only real difference here is that it’s all happening to single mom and retired Special Forces supersoldier Nikki (Milla Jovovich), whose daughter Chloe (Isabel Myers) sneaks out one time on her 16th birthday and gets Taken.

Roofied at and snatched from the club—in New Mexico, the only thing scarier than Old Mexico because it’s right here in America!—Chloe is hopeless. Thankfully, Nikki is overbearing and guilt-ridden; she missed most of her daughter’s birthdays on deployment in the vague Middle East. Now she’s just got a few hours to rescue her and prove that she’s a great mom. Where Liam Neeson had a downright luxurious 96 hours to find his daughter, Protector shaves a few days off its ticking clock: Nikki has a little less than two days before her daughter is statistically beyond her reach forever.

It’s an arbitrary rush, with an added wrinkle from Taken 3, where local law enforcement eventually pursue her as well, because of all the mass-murdering she gets up to. This element is perhaps the most elegant distillation of Protector‘s politics: pro-military, pro-one-man-killer, and anti-police (but only in the context of them trying to stop a vigilante). Protector boasts an ideology so reactionary that any of the cops willing to pursue Nikki—a woman who single-handedly kills a significant percentage of Las Cruces’ population over the course of a weekend—are discredited and beaten.

But Jovovich makes the woman this is all in service of into an actual person, against all odds. Caked in blood and coated in bruises, she embodies a jittery and sad shock, suppressed into steel when she’s in go-mode, and unleashed into bug-eyed mania when it all finally breaks loose. She can be a cringe-inducing mom who can’t understand that her teenager doesn’t just want cake and balloons on her birthday, she can be a traumatized soldier, she can be a grieving parent, and she sure as hell can be a weapon. While the action is thoroughly cheap, Jovovich is a seasoned pro at standing out amid the schlock. Apparently during her time in the military, she learned to get very, very good at beating down cartel henchmen who all look exactly like stuntmen.

These stuntmen all work for The Syndicate, the creatively named endpoint for Protector‘s organized crime fearmongering. The Syndicate, of course, is run by The Chairman (Gabriel Sloyer) and his underling (Don Harvey), who should just be named Underling. But Protector doesn’t aspire to the mythic cartoonishness of John Wick villains, though the traffickers are caricatures enough that Nikki can be a knife-twisting monster in her own right. Rather, these half-assed character names and plot details read as signs of a half-hearted production, like still-visible numerals in an abandoned paint-by-number picture. When Matthew Modine turns up as Nikki’s old military handler, he’s just one more stereotype in this feature-length afterthought.

And yet, there’s still enough in Protector that’s strange or curious enough to stand out among the Taken imitators, though none of it has anything to do with its female-fronted selling point. There’s an early time-jump that’s a confusing narrative choice, a mid-movie skateboard set piece that’s enjoyably odd, and a late twist that’s laughably cruel. It’s both more and less than “Taken: Mom Edition,” another boneheaded poking of conservative’s self-inflicted wounds around human trafficking with a title just as deluded as its content. 

Director: Adrian Grünberg
Writer: Bong-Seob Mun
Starring: Milla Jovovich, Isabel Myers, Manny Montana, Michael Stahl-David, Lydia Hull, D.B. Sweeney, Chase E. Kim, Don Harvey, Gabriel Sloyer, Texas Battle, Arica Himmel, Matthew Modine
Release Date: March 6, 2026

 
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