Maggie Q

Watch what Maggie Q does when a fight starts. She does not square up or brace; she is simply already moving, and the camera has to keep up. In Live Free or Die Hard (2007) her Mai Linh takes John McClane through an office, down a lift shaft and into a car hanging by its cables, and Nicolas De Toth cuts it quickly without once losing where she is. It is the sequence we still remembered when most of the second hour had gone, and we remembered it because it was plainly a person doing difficult things at speed, in a film that elsewhere trusts its computers more than its people. That is her trade, learned in Hong Kong, where she started in television and in films such as Naked Weapon (2002) with Jackie Chan as mentor, learning her lines phonetically while the fighting came first.

Hollywood noticed in 2006, when J.J. Abrams put her on Ethan Hunt's team as Zhen in Mission: Impossible III, the one woman in the unit, in a film that runs so hard it has little time to give her more than a place in the line. Len Wiseman handed her a better part a year later, a villain with something to do. Then television took her: four seasons as the title character in Nikita (2010–2013), which is where a large audience learned her name, followed by Designated Survivor (2016–2019) and the Divergent films (2014–2016). The Protégé (2021) put her back at the centre of a studio action film, and Ballard (2025–) keeps her there on the small screen. We have not reviewed the later work and will not judge it here, but the shape is plain: a lead on television, a supporting player in cinemas.

What works is the clarity. You can watch her fight without needing to be told afterwards what happened, and in Live Free or Die Hard she is one of the four reasons we gave for seeing the film, alongside a helicopter. What has not worked is the industry's imagination. She has talked about being seen through an action lens and little else, and the casting bears her out: agent, assassin, henchwoman, the capable woman among men. The films we have seen never ask her to do anything else, so we cannot tell you whether she can. That is the films' failing.

If you want to see what she does, start with the lift shaft. If you want to see whether she can carry a whole story rather than a set piece, Nikita and The Protégé are where the case is made. She has said, "I would rather be Bond." Having watched her go down that shaft, we see no reason she should not be.