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In retrospect, the 2020 Netflix action movie The Old Guard gave itself away with its very premise. Millennia-old warrior Andy (Charlize Theron) leads a group of near-immortals who attempt to protect and preserve humanity. They can heal from fatal wounds, reminiscent of fellow comic book character Wolverine. But at some point, their healing abilities falter, and they become mortal again. Typically, it takes takes hundreds of years for their powers to degrade like this. For the comics-based, franchise-ready Old Guard series, the breakdown only took five years. Though The Old Guard 2 is only the second installment in this movie series, it’s already far weaker than its predecessor. It does just about everything worse.
The one thing The Old Guard 2 does well is sketch out what an all-star roster of 21st-century action heroines might look like. When The Expendables faced this question, the producers could only shrug and offer up a few isolated examples, including non-acting MMA athletes (like Ronda Rousey) and performers not particularly known for action movies (like Megan Fox). Even less fusty action series like the Fast and Furious movies tend to prioritize franchise loyalty over badass new recruits.
It’s telling, though, that Theron has become one of the few major additions to the later-period Fast and Furious films. For the sequel, Andy is at odds with fellow immortals Quỳnh (The Creator and Furie’s Veronica Ngô), a former associate rescued from centuries of underwater solitude at the end of the first movie, and Discord (Uma Thurman), a heretofore unseen even-older immortal who has nefarious designs on Andy’s team. (Sadly, she seems to have no relation to the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic villain of the same name.) Neither newcomer is exclusively an action star, nor is the Oscar-winning Theron. But between Mad Max: Fury Road, Atomic Blonde, Furie, The Princess, and the Kill Bill movies, that’s a hell of a collective action filmography.
Curating the female action hall of fame isn’t the primary goal of either Old Guard film. The sequel continues the first film’s tradition of placing greater emphasis on its characters’ feelings and interpersonal relationships than on its plot, which would be a blessing if any of those feelings or relationships were well-expressed. Instead, director Victoria Mahoney (taking over from The Woman King’s Gina Prince-Bythewood) and writers Greg Rucka and Sarah L. Walker undermine the story’s strengths by dropping the characters into endless loops of moping about what it means to be mortal and/or immortal.
The previous film left off with Andy realizing her healing powers were waning, then deciding to stay and fight alongside her friends anyway. Her team includes newbie immortal Nile (Kiki Layne), longtime couple Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli), and mortal tech guy James (Chiwetel Ejiofor). After an initial action sequence that’s like a low-rent version of a 007 cold open, Andy hears from an old friend. New character Tuah (Henry Golding, bravely deciding not to fuss over the character name), comes with warnings about the re-emergence of Discord, who objects to Andy’s do-gooder interference in mortal dealings, and about Quỳnh, who has a more personal bone to pick.
Quỳnh was once Andy’s… lover? Platonic life partner? Bestie? For a sequel to a movie that foregrounds a sweet-natured romance between two men, The Old Guard 2 is weirdly cagey about the specifics. Regardless, Quỳnh feels betrayed by Andy’s inability to rescue her. “You couldn’t even find me in one small area of the ocean,” she grouses in just one example of dialogue that could be played for laughs if it were just 5 percent dumber. (Though it’s already pretty dumb.)
Much of the movie’s first hour consists of retcons and characters delivering messages to each other in person, which seems like a waste of the actors’ talents, until poor Thurman has to deliver menacing promises in the final stretch. Before the film’s dire finale, there’s one brief scene where Mahoney seems to be synthesizing the action-star cast into the screenplay’s more emo leanings: Quỳnh confronts Andy, and the encounter boils over into a physical fight, as they work out their frustrations in unhealthy but entertaining ways. In terms of action choreography, that level of simplicity seems to be about the movie’s speed.
Whenever Mahoney tries to go bigger, the intended thrills evaporate mid-sequence. In the first action scene, there’s a potentially great car stunt muddled by a clunky cut, with middling visual effects to not-quite-finish the job. The whole movie has a cheap, drab look, eventually sending its characters across generic catwalks to fight anonymous henchmen, scored with electronic music that sounds like it came pre-programmed with a new keyboard. Some dialogue that might have sounded thoughtful in the comic-book source material doesn’t work in a movie. There are also some lines that shouldn’t have made it past a first draft in any medium: “I’m scared of what she’s capable of, and so should you,” a character says at one point. Huh?
Honestly, many of these problems also apply to The Old Guard, which got a hefty bump in reputation for being a professionally made movie starring Charlize Theron that debuted on Netflix during the height of movie theater closures back in 2020. But the sequel looks and sounds worse as the story retreats into itself.
Discord’s abstract objections to Andy’s actions means that the immortals spend most of The Old Guard 2 in-fighting and squabbling over dull grudges. The sequel has a trimmer running time than the first movie, but Old Guard 2 makes a vice out of that virtue when it becomes clear that the filmmakers were confident they could just end the story in the middle and call this a series installment. The main takeaway is a new wrinkle to the immortal mythology that allows for a series of repetitive, confusing switcheroos. The team behind this movie went to the trouble of gathering a trio of physically imposing, capable women, capable of intense action sequences — all so they could spend most of their time looking miserable.
The Old Guard 2 is streaming on Netflix now.
