It’s a weird little irony that movies about immortality are typically movies about dying. Sure, Dracula can live for eons. But he lives in constant terror of sunlight, garlic and perpendicular sticks. Those “Highlander” guys can survive forever if you don’t cut their heads off, but they’re constantly trying to cut each other’s heads off. If you can’t die in a story the emphasis is almost always placed on how actually, you could die. That, or you’ve lived so long that death seems like a pleasant change of pace.
Films like “The Old Guard” and “The Old Guard 2” make immortality seem less like a power fantasy and more like… well, not so much a curse, but a parable. Everyone in the audience has to die eventually, so we like to think our gods would envy us, instead of gloating about how cool it is to keep doing fun stuff until the sun implodes.
If you remember the immortals from “The Old Guard,” Gina Prince-Bythewood’s above-average streaming superhero thriller from 2020, good for you! Your memory is working perfectly. For the rest of you, let’s catch up. The original movie, based on a comic by Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernández, told the story of a group of immortals who work as mercenaries because, I mean, heck, they’ve gotta do something I guess. They want to do good deeds, they think killing bad guys is the way to do that, and who are we to judge? They’re older than us. They’ve got the same unflappable air of authority as a parent with their arms crossed explaining why their four-year-old can’t have cookies before dinner.
This “Old Guard” is led by Andromache, played by Charlize Theron. After enlisting a brand new immortal into their ranks — Nile, played by Kiki Lane — she lost her own immortality, which depending on who you talk to is either a blessing or inconvenient. There are other immortals too but we don’t get to know them well. Two of them are in love. A dude played by Matthias Schoenaerts betrays everyone but it’s not as big a deal as you might think. I guess when you live forever you can’t hold a grudge for very long.
Strike that, I guess you can: The sequel’s plot kicks in when Quỳnh (Veronica Ngô) escapes from her tomb on the ocean floor. She’s been drowning, coming back to life, and then drowning again every few minutes for centuries. Centuries. It’s hard to believe she’d be capable of conscious thought after an ordeal like that, but mostly she’s just cranky. Quỳnh blames Andromache for not rescuing her sooner — pointing out, reasonably, that she was in a pretty small patch of ocean and it shouldn’t have been that hard — so she teams up with the villainous Discord (Uma Thurman), the oldest of the immortals, to exact her vengeance.
As directed by Victoria Mahoney, “The Old Guard 2” is a more efficient action vehicle than the original. There’s a massive reduction in clunky exposition (although there’s still too much) and the plot is efficient and easy to follow. A few new wrinkles in the mythos are silly as hell but it’s not like we expect a film about deathless mercenary do-gooders to make perfect sense. We just want it to be nifty.
And it sure is full of nift! Mahoney stages a fine action sequence, opening with a groovy potpourri of shootouts, car chases and boating accidents, with a window fabulously, simultaneously destroyed from two different angles. (I’ve never seen that one before. Kudos for adding it to the action movie lexicon.) She also finds unexpected moments to get poignant. The scene where Andromache walks to her reunion with Quỳnh, in a location they’ve visited for centuries, becomes an elegant one-shot sightseeing tour of the last few thousand years.
It would be nice to report that all that effort went into a film that had something to say, about anything of consequence (at least the original was a Prometheus riff). I’d have settled for a satisfying ending. This sequel is just too danged thin to end with another sequel tease. It’s hard enough to remember what happened in “The Old Guard,” and in that movie more stuff happened. By the time “The Old Guard 3” comes out we’ll be lucky if we even remember Charlize Theron was in this thing.
But here’s the rub: Charlize Theron is in it, and she’s in it to win it. She’d be forgiven for phoning in a bog-standard sci-fi action riff like these “Old Guard” movies but she’s fully committed to the bit. She adds pathos where by all rights there should be none and she spends the whole film dressed like Joan Jett. There’s nothing to complain about there. It’s her franchise, and as long as she’s having fun we probably will too. These above average, slightly forgettable movies may not live forever, but Theron’s badassery might.
“The Old Guard 2” premieres July 2 on Netflix.
The 15 Best 'Die Hard' Knockoffs Ever