The world isn't getting any better," Charlize Theron's nearly immortal warrior says early on in The Old Guard. "It's getting worse."
Well, I've got to agree with you there, Charlize. And some small part of that here at Cult Spark is due to the fact that the movie industry has essentially been forced to a halt, leaving us cinephiles high and dry when it comes to new releases. Thank god then for Netflix, which has already blessed us with the excellent Chris Hemsworth actioner Extraction (which we podcasted about a few weeks back) and the new Spike Lee joint Da 5 Bloods (podcast on that coming next week) since the Coronavirus pandemic hit. The Old Guard is more akin the first of those films, as it also takes an established action star and drops her in the middle of a pulpy adventure meant to deliver B-movie thrills while all the A-movie thrills sit locked up in Disney's vault waiting for theaters to re-open.
It's a good plan, especially since Theron seems primed to be the action-movie star of the 21st century. Her turn as Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road is iconic. And since then she's continued kicking ass across the genre, from stylish beat-em-ups to franchise juggernauts. The Old Guard will dutifully serve as a notch on her belt, although I'm sad to report the movie fails to justify its existence much past that. Theron plays Andy — or, as her friends in ancient Scythia knew her, Andromache. She's a nearly immortal warrior who has spent her hundreds and hundreds of living years fighting battles and trying to do good across the world. She's not the only one with this gift, as she works with a small team comprised of others who have been blessed with borderline immortality. (I say "borderline" because these people — after god knows how many deaths and resurrections — do eventually come to the end of the line. They're all basically Wolverine but with a life expectancy in the thousands of years instead of the hundreds.) For the last few centuries, Andy and her team have crissed-crossed the world as a kind of supernatural A-Team, helping folks who have nowhere else to turn.
Two key events in The Old Guard shake up the status quo: One, the team, so careful about sticking to the shadows, is outed by an ex-CIA agent named Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Copley is working with Merrick, a sniveling big-pharma CEO (Harry Melling … Dudley from the Harry Potter films!) who wants to harness the immortals' DNA to cure all diseases so he can make an ungodly amount of money. Two, a new immortal is "born" into the world: a young Marine named Nile (KiKi Layne) who gets her throat slit while in combat but wakes up the next day with nary a scratch on her. Andy and her unkillable squad have to rescue Nile from her already curious commanding officers, convince her to join the team and bring down Merrick before he captures them all and turns them into lab rats.
It's all very comic-booky, which isn't a surprise as The Old Guard is based on a comic series written by Greg Rucka, who also wrote the screenplay to the film. The movie deals in well-worn tropes from that genre, as well as some from the vampire genre, as these eternal warriors share a lot in common with their sharp-toothed cousins. (If you guessed that there's some whining in this movie about being forced to live on while everyone you love around you dies, you'd be right!) You'd think a movie about immortal warriors would have a ball with the concept, but The Old Guard feels annoyingly restrained. Andy carries an ancient battle axe for special occasions, but, for the most part, her team functions no differently from any modern-day special forces group. There is lots of automatic-weapons fire contained within standard military-flavored action scenes. These action bits are sturdily choreographed but are often chopped to nothing by the editing. There are a few flashbacks to earlier time periods, but they feel cheaply done and less epic than they really need to be.
Theron brings her usual electric presence to the proceedings, but she just isn't given enough to work with to manage to elevate the film. Her fellow immortal teammates are all boring. Merrick is a terrible, one-dimensional villain. Ejiofor seems lost playing a man who gets a tragic backstory to explain his motivations but mostly seems to be just hanging around for the sequel (which is, bizarrely, the exact same thing that happened to him in Doctor Strange). Everything is scored to a never-ending string of bad, mid-tempo, techno-pop music. There are a few interesting things going on around the fringes of the movie, including a particularly horrific side-story about another immortal warrior who was buried in an iron coffin at sea, meant to drown and resurrect over and over again for eternity. Although, like with Ejoifor, these things only seem to exist to serve as narrative fodder for The Old Guard Returns.
As for this movie, Rucka and director Gina Prince-Bythewood just don't seem interested in providing much more than the bare minimum of what the concept has to offer. How are these people given the power to come back from the dead? We don't really know. Why are they blessed with this gift? Uh, I guess because they're all fighters and they like to save people whose grandkids end up curing polio … or something. It's a mystical concept that refuses to really dive into the mysticism of it all. Instead, the filmmakers give Charlize Theron a gun and an axe and hope it will be enough.
It's something. But it's definitely not enough. If you haven't seen Extraction yet, watch that instead. And if you have, and you're quarantined at home wondering if we'll ever get to see Black Widow, then I guess it's really not worth me talking you out of watching The Old Guard. At the least, there's the welcome novelty of an action movie directed by a woman and featuring two female leads. And nothing here crosses over into being inept or embarrasing. But, by now, we've all seen what Theron can do. Hopefully next time Netflix puts her in a movie more worthy of her talents.
