The Protégé – 2021 – exquisite dialogue
At the first glance, The protégé doesn’t seem to be anything special. If you read about it, it seems to be your run-of-the-mill revenge story. You know, the kind where the person acting out the revenge seeks out and kills the responsible person for a close friend’s death. This is also what happens. Someone close to the revenger gets killed and she goes on a spree to seek her revenge. I really can’t put my finger on it, but this one is also a little different. It might partly have to do with how the dialogues are written. The lines and contact between some of the persons involved really are exquisite! It’s so funny hearing these lines being delivered in that way, still staying off being over the top. It’s funny and entertaining but never stupidly funny f you know what I mean?
I can’t say that I’ve followed lead actress Maggie Q’s career but she’s really good in the role of Anna – the protégé. She’s very agile, likable, beautiful, deadly, and fearless as the part demands her to be. But not only that. All the characters in the movie seem to be real. They might be a little over-the-top and eccentric but that only adds to the charm of the film. There’s a scene where Samuel L Jacksons‘ character Moody has a birthday and Anna gives him a Gibson Flying V electric guitar. If you know anything about guitars you know that this is a very rare guitar and that it was a failure for Gibson at the time. Hence very few exist. Of course, being a collector he gets ecstatic to finally have such a guitar in the collection and gets nostalgic and talks about when he saw Albert King playing such a guitar. Her reply is priceless “this is that guitar”. But that isn’t the only time tiny facts like this, maybe not about guitars but other things are woven into the dialog.
The violence is often very graphic and inventive. There are a few fighting scenes that don’t go along the usual lines. And especially since there is more than one expert assassin fighting each other during the running time, there is a lot of fighting scenes with no easy kills. I find it very entertaining watching two experts go at each other with all they got but since they’re pretty equal in skill none of them really gets the upper hand. This leads us to the relationship between Anna and the film’s major antagonist – Michael Rembrandt, played by Michael Keaton. This is a truly complicated relationship. There’s certainly a physical attraction between them, yet they are mortal enemies since they are on the opposite sides of the main villain and boss. This is where the dialog is really genius. Not only with words but their entire beings when they interact with each other. It need not be in a fighting scene. Eating at restaurants scenes och sex scenes makes no difference. They are pure genius!
See the Protégé as soon as you can. It won’t disappoint you!
