An uncommonly credible Netflix actioner about a team of immortal mercenaries who sell their skills to the highest bidder, Gina Prince-Bythewood’s “The Old Guard” was an oasis in the desert when it dropped on Netflix at the height of the pandemic, but I’d be lying if I said that it’s really stuck with me over the last five years. And yet, there’s one detail of its story that I haven’t been able to shake — a character fate so grim that it made living forever seem like a fate worse than death.
If you’ve seen the movie (or read the graphic novel series on which it’s based), you know what I’m talking about: An eternal warrior named Quỳnh (Van Veronica Ngo) is sealed inside an iron maiden during a 16th century witch trial and cast into the bottom of the sea, where she’s doomed to drown, gasp back to life, and then drown again until the end of time. Not fun!
Be that as it may, Quỳnh didn’t seem too happy when she inexplicably reappeared on the surface at the end of the film. The look on her face was less “I’m so relieved to have air in my lungs for the first time in more than 500 years,” and more “It’s too bad that my friends are forever, because I really want to murder them for letting me choke in hell for half a millennium.”
What we already know, and what Quỳnh is conflicted to learn towards the beginning of “The Old Guard 2,” is that fate will give her the chance for revenge, as her ride-and-not-die bestie Andromache (Charlize Theron) somehow lost her powers during the course of the previous movie. And so the stage would appear to be set for a fun — and emotionally fraught — grudge match of a sequel about two several-thousand-year-olds who fight over the best way to spend the rest of their suddenly finite time together.
Alas, neither of these women can imagine just how finite that time will be. For one thing, the oldest immortal of them all (Uma Thurman as Discord) has returned with a plan to purge the Earth of her own kind. For another, “The Old Guard 2” is frustratingly — if also pointedly — rushed for a movie about people who’ve been alive for eons, and it never gives any of its characters the chance to meaningfully hash out how the bonds of friendship might pull tighter as they get twisted over the course of a few hundred decades.
What does it entail to hurt someone who lives forever? How deep can a wound fester when time fails to heal it? Were Andy and Quỳnh in love, or is the Hays Code-level homoeroticism between them meant to reflect a relationship too vast to be defined by mortal parameters? Some of these topics are nominally addressed through aggrieved wire-fu and/or an elaborate shootout near the core of a nuclear power plant, and “The Old Guard 2” — which hits the ground running, and takes palpably goofy pleasure in being unburdened from the table-setting that sucked the fun out of the first one — excels in the rare moments when its action stems from the loaded question of what its characters are really fighting for.
To an even greater degree than its predecessor, however, this sequel is too busy satisfying the basic conditions of its genre to do anything memorable with them. Worse: the gallingly incomplete nature of its story — which ends on Netflix’s biggest cliffhanger since “Squid Game 2,” but without the benefit of a third chapter in the can — leaves the movie with a putrid aftertaste, not only because it’s so unsatisfying, but also because it affirms the moral of Greg Rucka’s script in the worst possible way. Andy tells us that time is only as meaningful as you make it. In that sense, it’s hard not to feel like the 104 minutes it takes to watch “The Old Guard 2” are more of a waste than they’re worth.
Anyone still endeared to these characters from Prince-Bythewood’s installment will probably enjoy the chance to catch up with them, however brief it might be. Helming her first movie since 2011’s “Yelling to the Sky,” replacement director Victoria Mahoney seizes on the fun of watching Andy’s crew run toward danger without a care in the world, and this sequel’s explosive opening sequence — a raid on an arms dealer’s mansion in Croatia — is made a million times more enjoyable by the devil may care attitude that immortals like Nicky (Luca Marinelli, fresh off his silent but sublime performance in “Death Stranding 2”) and Joe (Marwan Kenzari) bring to the James Bond-coded car chase that caps things off.
Nile Freeman (KiKi Layne) was a new recruit the last time around, but she’s already outgrown any fear of death, much to the same extent that the newly mortal Andy has yet to develop one. Chiwetel Ejiofor’s CIA liaison also returns as an audience surrogate of sorts (someone needs to gawp at all of the carnage), and though he doesn’t get a ton to do, no movie has ever been made worse by having more Chiwetel Ejiofor in it. And what of Matthias Schoenaerts’ Booker, who was exiled for betraying the Old Guard as part of a bid to cure his eternality? Well, he’s back too, if only so Quỳnh can use him to find Andy.
While his scenes with the group are some of the movie’s best for how they weigh a single misstep against several millennia of solidarity, there are other traces of nuance in the early going of this story. Still one of the great undersung action stars of the 21st century, Theron might delegate most of her performance in these movies to her jet-black wig, but she convincingly sells the idea that Andy is enjoying her newfound mortality and all that it entails — the hangovers are brutal, but getting drunk is a lot more fun. The double-edged sword of her reunion with Quỳnh is sharpened by the looming specter of death, and Mahoney tees it up with a clever (and seemingly in-camera) shot that finds Andy walking through the centuries in order to meet up with the woman who once walked alongside her.
But as the movie begins to bullshit its way through the whys and hows of living forever, the procedure of it all starts to distract from the emotions at hand, and Discord is never remotely interesting enough as a villain to justify all of the legwork required to make sense of her plot. Henry Golding plays a bookkeeper whose sole purpose is to set up the lore, but Discord’s threat always feels more contrived than inevitable.
Thurman glowers with the best of them, but a furtive plan and a few hard stares isn’t enough to support a character who’s supposedly been miffed at we mortals ever since she watched Jesus get crucified before her eyes. Does she want to purge us off the planet, as hijacking a nuclear power plant might suggest, or is she more concerned with her own suffering? “The Old Guard 2” tells us the answer, but forces us to wait until the next movie, if there even is a next movie, to give a shit about how she got there, or what it could mean for Andy’s ever-complicating relationship with Quỳnh.
And there’s precious little pleasure to be found in that deferral, as the climactic fight — in which Beatrix Kiddo finally gets to flex her skills — is an under-lit CGI blah-fest that epitomizes how eager this franchise is to sacrifice its eternal characters at the altar of hyper-ephemeral streaming dross. That non-finale is especially disappointing at the end of a movie that makes an effort, at least during its first half, to run with its premise. The action can be choppy, and the camerawork grows increasingly focused on compensating for little cheats in the film’s stunt work, but Mahoney never misses a chance to crush a pair of legs that can grow right back, or to smash someone through a window without any concern for what might happen if they catch a shard of glass in their neck.
Watching Joe smush his disembodied thumb back onto his hand with a perfect “thumbs up,” it’s hard not to wish that his franchise could magically pull itself together in the same way. Alas, those who loved “The Old Guard” are going to be the ones most annoyed by the decision to leave its sequel severed in half. Whether it’s the ultimate goal of her plan or just a byproduct of what she’s really after, Discord is happy for people to suffer; one way or another, she’s about to get her wish.
Grade: C
“The Old Guard 2” is now available to stream on Netflix.
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