Charlize Theron walks tall and carries a sweet ax in ‘Old Guard’
Saving the day seems like a decent gig. After several centuries, like anything you keep doing over and over, it could get old.
“I’m just so tired of it,” says an exasperated Charlize Theron, playing the immortal Andromache the Scythian (aka Andy), in the Netflix action movie “The Old Guard.” In director Gina Prince-Bythewood’s film, Andy – a warrior doing her thing for a few millennia – heads up a squad of near-unkillable mercenaries who discover another one of their own. But “Old Guard” feels fresher as a high-minded treatise on mortality and loss than a superhero-y franchise starter.
Andy and her mercenary crew – Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli) – reunite after some time apart, with their leader wondering about their place in the grand scheme of things. “We’ve done nothing. The world isn’t getting any better, it’s getting worse,” a listless Andy contends. Still, when an ex-CIA operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor) wants to hire them to foil child abductions in South Sudan, they get on a chopper for the rescue.
Unfortunately, it’s a trap, the secret of their immortality is unearthed, and they come on the radar of a pharmaceutical CEO (Harry Melling, best known as oafish Dudley Dursley in the “Harry Potter” films) with machinations of using their DNA to add years to people’s lifespans – though he’s really more interested in adding to his profit margins.
Meanwhile in Afghanistan, Nile Freeman (KiKi Layne) is a young Marine who gets her throat sliced open while hunting a terrorist and everyone in her unit, including Nile, is a little freaked out when the fatal wound heals itself. She has visions of the ancient operatives, and they of her, and Andy seeks her out to explain the positives and negatives of her new everlasting status quo.
Written by Greg Rucka (who adapts his comic-book series), “The Old Guard” is best when diving into its own mythology – seeing Theron riding a horse in old-school battle armor is pretty neat – and digging into what it really means to be immortal, including constant physical pain over eons of battles and the loneliness of losing everyone you’ve ever loved.
That hits harder than the fight scenes, which lean toward standard fare (other than the occasional bullet popping out of a character’s head during the super-duper healing process). When it comes to two-fisted fury, Theron has seen better action in “Atomic Blonde” and “Mad Max: Fury Road,” though she does carry a sweet ax. “The Old Guard” notably takes into account its operatives’ journey through time with weaponry spanning swords to machine guns.
The major personalities are mainly various levels of cynical and not many stand out. Nile gets a nice character arc – plus Layne, whom audiences first met in “If Beale Street Could Talk,” has decent chemistry with Theron – and the dynamic of Joe and Nicky, ostensibly an ages-old gay couple, is noteworthy in the overall narrative. Some homophobic military goons get huffy when Joe and Nicky kiss when captured, and then the bad guys get their butts whupped.
Even with its drawbacks, “The Old Guard” weaves some new ideas into a familiar genre and is worth taking a flier on for action-movie lovers.
Two stars
out of four stars
Rated R; graphic violence, language
1 hour, 58 minutes
