“I’m just so tired of it,” says an exasperated Charlize Theron in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s “The Old Guard,” Can you blame her? Theron plays the oldest member of the Old Guard, a group of immortal mercenaries who have been fighting the good fight for thousands of years. Immortality can be exhausting and this `Netflix-produced “superhero” movie, based on Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernandez’s 2017 comic book, makes a good case against it.
Prince-Bythewood, best known for her finely-aged drama “Love & Basketball,” takes the familiarity of what is essentially a standard action movie and grounds it with likable characters and compulsively watchable action scenes. It also helps to have Theron as her lead, the Oscar-winning actress has proven to be more than just a pretty face over her successful 3-decade movie career. Playing Andy (aka Andromache of Scythia) Theron brings a similar kind of exhaustive wisdom to this role as she did with her Furiosa in “Mad Max: Fury Road.”
After a short-lived retirement, the movie has Andy reuniting with the only other three beings like her (portrayed by Matthias Schoenaerts, Marwan Kenzari, and Luca Marinelli). It’s just been the four of them for thousands of years, They take on a new mission, this time to save a group of kidnapped schoolgirls in South Sudan, it’s all organized by an ex-CIA ally (an understated Chiwetel Ejiofor). However, the mission goes sour, someone sold their position out, but who?
Enter a fifth member of the group, young and sprightful Marine Nile Freeman (KiKi Layne), a soldier wounded in Afghanistan who sees her life-threatening injury - she had her neck sliced open by a terrorist - quickly evaporate. Freeman is understandably freaked out to discover that the United States government has turned on her. She escapes their capture, with the help of Andy, only to learn of a nefarious pharmaceutical CEO (played by a stiff Harry Melling), looking to imprison these immortal heroes and use their DNA to add years to people’s lifespans.
Got that? “The Old Guard,” written by Rucka (who adapts his own comic-book), works best as work on loneliness, mortality, and loss, rather than as a superhero movie. When it pauses to contemplate these issues, it turns a pedestrian story into something more honest and restrained. Andy is haunted by the ghosts of her past, she’s watched everybody she knew age and die, most notably Quynh (Veronica Ngo), a fellow immortal, who was Andy’s right-hand in many important battles she’s fought, only to then disappear into thin air.
Of course, the constraints of the genre, and some of the film’s narrative choices, don’t shock or surprise as much as Prince-Bythewood intends them to. The villain in “The Old Guard, a Pharmaceutical CEO (played by a stiff Harry Melling) is underwhelming, ditto the film’s knack for never straying too far from the genre’s predictable tropes. We all know where this is going, but the bruising action sequences, expertly shot by Barry Ackroyd (“The Hurt Locker” “United 93”) zing the frames with some much-needed excitement. And yet, something’s missing here, the drama is never as involving as it should be and the stakes never as high as intended. Whether the makes of this film care to admit it or not, this is very much another attempt at franchise-building rather than a genuine crack at delivering something different within the genre. [B-]
“The Old Guard” has its Netflix premiere on July 10.
Edward Berger seems to have settled on what comes next. His Lance Armstrong biopic, starring Austin Butler, is now holding casting calls, with production eyed for January.