A team of glamorous mercenaries storms a compound in which kidnapped girls are being held captive. Men with guns promptly mow them down. Are we witnessing a more realistic (and necessarily shorter) breed of action movie?
No. The Old Guard, which stars Charlize Theron and debuted on Netflix this month, tells the story of a quartet of immortal warriors who roam the planet looking for wrongs to right. Their leader and oldest member is Andromache the Scythian (Theron), a gloomy ass-kicker whose grievances presumably include having to introduce herself as “Andy.” Filling the ranks are fellow sad-sack Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts) and the gay-but-otherwise-pedestrian duo of Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli). Over the centuries, the foursome has taken enough bullet holes, knife wounds, and burnings at the stake to slay an entire army. Kill them all you want. They just can’t seem to stay dead.
Nor, for that matter, can combat Marine Nile Freeman (KiKi Layne of If Beale Street Could Talk). Deployed to Afghanistan, Nile suffers a vicious neck wound but awakens hours later to discover that her body has miraculously healed itself. Andy, meanwhile, has witnessed the episode in a dream. Convinced that Nile is her newest peer, she races across the globe to save the young woman from an endless regimen of military “testing.”
Alas, the fear of medical exploitation is something of a theme for movie characters with extraordinary bodies. (One wonders if Andy and company enjoy the occasional X-Men flick.) Skulking in a London lab, practically salivating at the money to be made, is evil Pharma executive Steven Merrick (Harry Melling). With the help of the immortals’ sometime employer, Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Merrick hopes to capture the gang, study their DNA, and use it to produce — oh, horror! — a lifesaving drug or two.
That the resulting hash of a film is mostly enjoyable is a tribute to the subtlety of director Gina Prince-Bythewood, whose previous credits include Love & Basketball and The Secret Life of Bees. Refreshingly respectful of her audience’s intelligence, Prince-Bythewood allows her camera to provide the necessary exposition, establishing the rules of The Old Guard’s world with visual cues rather than narration. An early example of this approach occurs when Andy initiates Nile into their order by exchanging a series of deathblows. Elsewhere, the movie explores a change in one immortal’s abilities with a moving and nearly wordless sequence in a French drugstore.
As for The Old Guard’s actors, they are, for the most part, well chosen and entertaining. As Andy, Theron is as captivating as ever, a lovely brawler whose on-screen magnetism remains one of Hollywood’s most bankable assets. Similarly strong are Schoenaerts and Ejiofor, despite the fact that the former’s character arc is ripped straight from The Matrix, while the latter is almost criminally underused. (Expect more of Ejiofor in the inevitable sequels.) Of the principals, in fact, only Melling disappoints as the devious Dr. Merrick. A monomaniac as well as an eccentric — what’s with the hoodie under the sports coat? — Melling’s Merrick is exactly the sort of one-dimensional villain whom Prince-Bythewood ought to have been clever enough to avoid.
Where the director is on much firmer ground is in her decision to probe, with striking verisimilitude, the consequences of a body that refuses to give out. At times, this work is merely psychological, as when Booker describes to Nile “what it is to lose everyone you’ve ever loved.” Yet The Old Guard also concedes the nightmarish physical costs that can accompany immortality. In one particularly haunting scene, Prince-Bythewood sends her camera to the bottom of the ocean. There, an early immortal, locked in iron as a punishment for witchcraft, has been drowning and reviving, repeatedly, for centuries.
If only this attention to detail had been carried throughout the film, The Old Guard might have been the action movie of the year, a stylish jaunt the star power of which magnifies its director’s sure-handedness. As things stand, unfortunately, the picture is merely good, and it is in three central flaws that the difference lies. The first is that the film’s fight scenes are nothing special, a defect linked to, but not excused by, the fact that close-range combat is nearly impossible to shoot in an interesting way. The second is the implausible (and obviously voguish) characterization attached to Andy, who mocks Nile’s religious faith as “illogic” despite being, herself, a supernatural being.
Most damaging of all, however, is the rank absurdity of The Old Guard’s moral narrative, which rests on the notion that the immortals have fought on the “right” side of human conflicts for as long as they’ve been alive. Never mind that their choices throughout time are astonishingly well aligned with 21st-century liberal values. (A record kept by Ejiofor’s character is a veritable Who’s Who of approved causes, from participation in a Haitian slave insurrection to the prevention of a third atomic attack on Japan.) The immortals’ judgments are incoherent and contradictory by any standard. Thus, viewers who are paying close attention are asked to believe that the same warriors who fought alongside Castro in the Cuban revolution nevertheless opposed the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia 20 years later. As my wife joked at the movie’s conclusion, “I guess they learned their lesson.”
There is an argument to be made, of course, that The Old Guard’s shortcomings represent not failure but the future of Hollywood filmmaking, that exquisitely diverse heroes will henceforth carry their impeccable politics into battle, forever. If that’s the case, moviegoers can only echo what the immortals must have thought at many points in their long, long lives: “What could we possibly have done to deserve this?”
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
