"Federal Protection" is a cool and violent movie.The plot: Frankie Carbone (Assante) is a small-time hood stealing cars for a living. When a contract on his life gets botched, he is put into the witness protection program. It seems like he's safe, but he's not. Bootsie (Meyer) is a hitwoman who will stop at nothing to find him.Armand Assante is always worth watching because of his excellent over-acting. Watch "Dot.Kill" to see what I mean. He doesn't disappoint here, with a couple classic yelling moments from Assante. Dina Meyer is very sexy in her role. The action scenes, while silly, are bloody and well-staged.If you like the actors involved, you'll enjoy "Federal Protection" For more insanity, please visit: comeuppancereviews.com

How do these scripts get made anyway? Why would a good actor like Armande Assante agree to this brain-dead piece? I hope he got paid well. This stinker couldn't have read well. *Spoilers*This film had so many holes, I won't bore you with them all (each scene seemed to have several) - bad accents (the one head mobster sounded like he was from LA not Jersey, or maybe even Canada) - annoying soundtrack. The "comedy" aspect - like a chick who sticks the heel of her pump into a guy's forehead wasn't funny or believable. This same lady who has absolutely no scruples (she kills her brother-in-law at the end of that scene for some reason or another which isn't really explained *and* she is sleeping with the guy) later on in the film decides she will sacrifice herself for that same sister - huh? There is also a golf bit that is supposed to be funny - it may have been a little funny the first time but when they pulled the same bit at the end all it did was elicit eye-rolling moans in our little audience.The acting was uniformly awful except for Armande - in fact, the film is almost watchable during his scenes. To think that someone on this forum said this junk was better than "Whole 9 Yards"!Save your time, watch an episode of "Sopranos" instead, or, better still, watch "Whole 9 Yards".

I agree with the above comments. The films made up in the Great White North are an accounting trick, caused by a) the dirt-cheap Canadian dollar, and the availabilty of subsidies -- though this may have changed recently, I'm not sure. For this, what happens is that a producer based in NY or Los Angeles takes a project written with some US locale in mind and either shoots Montreal as "New York" or "Paris". It is neither, though it is a beautiful city in its own right. This way of structuring the Deal puts story, local color, regional accents, all of that way down at the bottom of consideration, when it should be near the top. (That's why a movie -- Woody Allen's Manhattan is just an example -- can evoke a time and place better than any other art form, and why all these transplanted cheapies look like they're shot in Vinyl Palookaville.) Americans and Canadians both deserve a better cinema.

"Federal Protection", a vanilla middle-of-the-road action/drama with the feel of tv direct production, tells of a swaggering chop shop racketeer (Assante) from Chicago who is ensconced in the federal witness protection program in the burbs of Little Rock, AR where he is too easily recognized by his neighbors one of whom he falls for while the others try to extort money from the mob for giving him up. Obvious, predictable, contrived, and generic with some bloody shootouts, almost no sex, no nudity, and very little chemistry, "FP" is strictly nominal no-brainer entertainment. Keep expectations low and enjoy.