Who wants to live forever? So asked Freddie Mercury on the soundtrack to 1986’s Highlander, a film to which The Old Guard owes no small debt. That existential quandary lies at the heart of this Netflix original thriller, adapted by Greg Rucka from his and Leandro Fernández’s 2017 comic-book series. Charlize Theron’s Andromache of Scythia (Andy to her friends) is a millennia-old warrior weighed down with undying ennui. Having spent most of recorded history up to her elbows in gore, she has witnessed the same old squabbles, the same inhumanity, and wonders if there’s any point to it all. But, after taking a year off (the immortal equivalent of a bank holiday) to contemplate, she and her ageless teammates (Matthias Schoenaerts, Marwan Kenzari and Luca Marinelli) reluctantly return to their calling as guns for hire. This time, though, the perennial quartet’s refusal to expire is captured on film, exposing their secret and leading to a showdown with the deadliest foe of all: an unscrupulous pharmaceutical company.
With regular swordplay (Andy herself favours a battle-axe), flashbacks in period garb, and a great deal of angsty hand-wringing over the downsides of eternal life (“It’s not what time steals, it’s what it leaves behind; things you can’t forget”), the film doffs a tartan cap at Connor MacLeod with little apology. But where Russell Mulcahy’s film (for all its hamminess) had a sweeping, epic scope that spanned history, The Old Guard is far more constrained. With a narrative anchored firmly in the present, hints at the depth of the immortals’ past are limited to coy allusions about Andy’s age, fragmented glimpses of her raising hell in the Middle Ages, and a rather clumsy scrapbook, complete with awkward Photoshopping alongside Martin Luther King. Beyond these superficial nods, there’s little real sense of who Andy or her companions really are; their experiences brushed past but never truly explored. Schoenaerts’ Booker opens up about how failing to age caused his children to spurn him, and there’s talk of another immortal who one day simply stopped healing and died, which made them all a bit sad. But these nods to emotional scar tissue aren't given sufficient room to breathe — the film too keen to skip over any meaty exploration of character to keep the plot moving. Kenzari and Marinelli’s characters — eternal lovers who met fighting on opposite sides of the Crusades — do have more texture to them, but even this is concentrated in a single, albeit touching, declaration of love in the back of a panel van.
Regular flurries of bullets and blades serve as the film’s main strength.
Despite the story limitations, Theron is on fine form as the Scythian Methuselah, borrowing Furiosa’s steely glower and channelling her aptitude for complex choreography previously showcased in Atomic Blonde. Director Gina Prince-Bythewood (Love & Basketball), who came close to adapting Sony’s since-abandoned Black Cat and Silver Sable movie Silver & Black, keeps the action fast and frantic. Regular flurries of bullets and blades serve as the film’s main strength, and while unlikely to give David Leitch any sleepless nights, The Old Guard gets points for leaning into the idea that the immortals can die, they just do so over and over again — with all the excruciating sensation that goes with it.
Most of the film’s humanity is rooted in KiKi Layne’s Nile, a young US Marine serving in the Middle East and the first new immortal in centuries. Wide-eyed and incredulous at her newfound resilience — she shrugs off an insurgent’s blade to the throat without so much as a scar — Nile makes a handy access point for the viewer, teasing out backstory and lending proceedings some heart along the way. Chiwetel Ejiofor is somewhat wasted in a his role as a shady ex-CIA wonk, while the film’s primary antagonist — a Big Pharma CEO played by Harry ‘Dudley Dursley’ Melling — is so overplayed as to veer into parody. This lack of character depth highlights the somewhat throwaway plot, which never quite manages to kick in to high gear. It’s particularly unfortunate that the film’s most promising subplot, involving imprisoned immortal Veronica Ngo, is almost entirely abandoned, leaving a potentially far more interesting tale untold.
Solid action beats and a story that skips from Sudan to Afghanistan, Paris and, finally, Guildford, ensure there's enjoyment to be had but The Old Guard remains a slightly disappointing revenge/conspiracy yarn, that never quite lives up to its excellent conceit. An intriguing coda does set the stage for a far more lively sequel, but short of a ratings landslide for this instalment, it's likely there can be only one.
