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Just as Ryan Coogler crafted “ Black Panther ” as an entry in his own directorial universe, Gina Prince-Bythewood casts her Netflix superhero film, “The Old Guard” in her own stylistic image. The director of “Love and Basketball,” “ The Secret Life of Bees ,” and “ Beyond the Lights ” enjoys scenes where her characters get all up in their feelings, and she invites you to climb in there with them. These are some introspective characters, a by-product of their having lived for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Several times, the camera lingers on their faces as they contemplate, or remember, the sadness of losing someone. The film sits patiently with these moments, putting the same level of importance on the characters and their emotions as it does on the action. A scene of Andy ( Charlize Theron ) savoring a piece of baklava carries the same weight as a scene of her cleaving a foe with a gigantic battle ax.

Andy is the eldest member of an elite band of people who appear to be immortal. The opening scene features a flash-forward to their bullet-ridden bodies; a little later, we see them rising up fully healed after this slaughter, spitting out the bullets that have penetrated their faces as they mow down their opponents. This squad of four is about to be joined by a fifth member, Nile ( KiKi Layne ), a Marine stationed in Afghanistan whose slit throat suddenly heals itself. She is also plagued by nightmarish visions of other team members, a psychic link that, according to Booker ( Matthias Schoenaerts ), only shuts down once they have all met. Until Nile showed up, Booker was the Guard’s youngest member, joining in 1812.

Since “ Mad Max: Fury Road ” cemented Theron’s ability to weld her Oscar-winning acting skills onto the bodies of fierce warriors who kick ass, “The Old Guard” treats us to a great, plane-bound fight between Nile and Andy. The two showcase their battle credentials while Andy offers gruesome examples of Nile’s ability to heal. With Nile’s braided, natural hairdo and Andy’s Karen-style coif, their battle plays like an unintentional and vengeful commentary on those angry “can I speak to a manager” videos plaguing social media. What does feel intentional, however, is the inclusivity inherent in the depiction of the immortals, both in flashbacks and in its current timeline. They are played by a variety of different races and it never once feels forced or pandering.

In addition to observing the humanity of its heroes, “The Old Guard” also employs Prince-Bythewood’s penchant for grandiose, melodramatic gestures that shouldn’t work at all yet play out masterfully. Think about Noni on that balcony in “Beyond the Lights,” or Monica setting the terms of the climactic game in “Love and Basketball.” Here, the moment occurs between Andy’s teammates Nicolo ( Luca Marinelli ) and Joe ( Marwan Kenzari ). By virtue of their shared immortality, these men have been together for hundreds of years. They are lovers whose “Meet Cute” occurred when they were constantly killing each other during the Crusades. After they’ve been captured by minions of our villain, the evil pharmaceutical dudebro, Merrick ( Harry Melling ), Joe’s concern for his fallen comrade is mocked with homophobic intent. “Is he your boyfriend?” his captor asks. Joe’s response with a declaration of love as shamelessly florid as it is heartfelt, putting that paltry moment of LGBTQ representation in “ Avengers: Endgame ” to shame.

Writer Greg Rucka , who adapted the graphic novel he wrote with Leandro Fernandez , hits all the standard story beats of this genre. There’s the obvious exception to the immortality rule, an over-the top villain, the villain’s conflicted right hand man ( Chiwetel Ejiofor ), a very sad backstory of torment for Andy, a betrayal, a climactic rescue mission, and even a scene that sets up the sequel. But he and Prince-Bythewood always support these familiarities with their actors’ ability to depict how strongly bound together their characters are. There are numerous scenes where people just talk to each other, either to get exposition out of the way or to propel the story forward, and every time, we come away feeling as if we know these people. So when the torture-filled middle portion kicks in, there is genuine concern for our heroes. These scenes force us to question the terror of being condemned to a lifetime of gruesome medical experiments simply because you cannot shuffle off this mortal coil.

Though it contains more dramatic sequences than most superhero movies, “The Old Guard” doesn’t scrimp on the good, old-fashioned violence. Combat scenes are filmed so you can see who’s doing what, and edited together for maximum carnage and effect by Prince-Bythewood’s usual editor, Terilyn A. Shropshire . Shropshire is a favorite of directors like Kasi Lemmons and, as seen in her work in the first episode of Ava DuVernay's “ When They See Us ,” she’s very good at alternating between intimate drama and the much wider scope of action, keeping both speeds in balance. The cinematography by Barry Ackroyd and Tami Reiker is also quite good; their sequences at night and inside rooms have the same richness as their brightly lit outdoor shots of France and the desert.

"The Old Guard” has the benefit of not carrying the strict, fan-driven baggage of the Marvel and DC movies. As a result, it may not get the attention it deserves. But this is an excellent example of what this type of film can be, one I hope will be studied by the much bigger-budgeted tentpoles you know and love. I can’t remember the last time I was actually pumped to see a sequel based on a “post-credits” teaser—to be honest, I never know what the hell is going on in most of them—but this one made me wish Netflix had switched me immediately to the next installment as the credits rolled.

Now playing on Netflix.

Odie Henderson

Odie "Odienator" Henderson has spent over 33 years working in Information Technology. He runs the blogs Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire  here .

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The Old Guard (2020)

Rated R for sequences of graphic violence, and language.

118 minutes

Charlize Theron as Andromache of Scythia / Andy

KiKi Layne as Nile Freeman

Matthias Schoenaerts as Booker

Marwan Kenzari as Yusuf Al-Kaysani / Joe

Luca Marinelli as Nicky

Chiwetel Ejiofor as Copley

Harry Melling as Merrick

• Gina Prince-Bythewood

Writer (based on the graphic novel series by)

Writer (comic book co-creator).

• Leandro Fernandez

Cinematographer

• Barry Ackroyd
• Tami Reiker
• Terilyn A. Shropshire
• Volker Bertelmann
• Dustin O'Halloran

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• User reviews

The Old Guard

A covert team of immortal mercenaries is suddenly exposed and must now fight to keep their identity a secret just as an unexpected new member is discovered. A covert team of immortal mercenaries is suddenly exposed and must now fight to keep their identity a secret just as an unexpected new member is discovered. A covert team of immortal mercenaries is suddenly exposed and must now fight to keep their identity a secret just as an unexpected new member is discovered.

• Gina Prince-Bythewood
• Leandro Fernandez
• Charlize Theron
• Matthias Schoenaerts
• 1.8K User reviews
• 263 Critic reviews
• 70 Metascore
• 5 wins & 24 nominations

• (as Mette Towley)

• Dr Meta Kozak

• Plainclothes 1
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia Greg Rucka wrote the first draft screenplay, but when Charlize Theron came aboard, she had a number of issues with it. These were raised in a conference call with Theron, which Rucka described as "one of the worst experiences of my career." He did another rewrite but was then fired. Theron's production company commissioned a new script from new writers but Netflix hated that version. When Gina Prince-Bythewood came on board, she recommissioned Rucka, who was able to patch up his differences with Theron.
• Goofs When Booker hands Andy the unloaded HK USP, she should have noticed. Anyone as familiar with weapons as she is would notice the weight difference between an unloaded gun and a loaded one. The balance of the gun without bullets in a polymer handle would also be very noticeable. Nile, as a marine, also would have noticed when Andy gave it to her.

Soldier : What is he? Your boyfriend?

Joe : You're a child. An infant. Your mocking is thus infantile. He's not my boyfriend. This man is more to me than you can dream. He's the moon when I'm lost in darkness and warmth when I shiver in cold. And his kiss still thrills me, even after a millennia. His heart overflows with the kindness of which this world is not worth of. I love this man beyond measure and reason. He's not my boyfriend. He's all and he's more.

Nicky : You're an incurable romantic.

[Joe and Nicky kiss in front of the stunned guards]

• Crazy credits Close-ups of the items on the bulletin board with the evidence of the immortal people is seen in the background during the first part of the credits, followed by a scene of video evidence of one of the scenes in the movie being deleted.
• Connections Featured in Chris Stuckmann Movie Reviews: The Old Guard (2020)
• Soundtracks Born Alone, Die Alone Written by Madalen Duke (as Madalen Duke), Gabriela Olmedo Catalán and Adrianne Gonzalez Performed by Madalen Duke (as Madalen Duke) By arrangement with All Media Music Group, Inc.

User reviews 1.8K

• Jul 10, 2020
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• How come her earrings don't pop out like the bullets?
• July 10, 2020 (United States)
• United States
• Official site
• The Old Guard: Những Chiến Binh Bất Tử
• Marrakech, Morocco
• Skydance Media
• Denver and Delilah Productions
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $70,000,000 (estimated)

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 5 minutes
• Dolby Atmos

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‘The Old Guard’ Review: Fighting to the Death, and Beyond

Charlize Theron leads a group of immortal warriors in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s fresh take on the superhero genre.

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By A.O. Scott

“The Old Guard” could just as well have been called “The New Blood,” since that’s what it tries to pump into the weary superhero genre, with a reasonable degree of success and quite a lot of, well, blood. With the familiar movie-studio franchises in lockdown, Netflix has the opportunity to introduce a new squad of specially empowered warriors, drawn from the pages of Greg Rucka’s graphic novel series, brought to life by the director Gina Prince-Bythewood and set loose against an evil tech-bro big pharma C.E.O. and his heavily armed minions.

The fighters — led by the fearless, furious Andy (Charlize Theron) — don’t have fancy costumes or alter egos, and they all share the same superpower, which is not dying. Or not staying dead. When those minions hit them with automatic-rifle barrages, Andy and her colleagues fall down and bleed, but then they jump up again, wounds quickly fading, to finish off their surprised attackers.

Andy is the boss because she’s been doing this the longest — since antiquity, when she went by Andromache. The others include Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli), lovers who met cute on opposite sides of the Crusades, and Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), who joined up during the Napoleonic Wars. Much of “The Old Guard,” which gently clears a path for possible sequels, has to do with the initiation of the newest member of the team, a young United States Marine named Nile Freeman (KiKi Layne).

There have been a few others over the centuries. One thing Nile learns, as she struggles to understand her immortality, is that it comes with some fine print. Not a stake-through-the-heart vampire escape clause, but something more subtle and philosophical. Time comes for everyone, sooner or later, and Andy’s crew lives in the shadow of both perpetual loss — they are doomed to outlive anyone they might care about — and constant uncertainty. They are powerful, but also vulnerable.

Which is a good look nowadays. Nobody needs arrogant, swaggering heroes, and the tone of hard-boiled melancholy that Theron in particular sets is welcome. Like a gunslinger in a certain kind of western, Andy is having doubts about her vocation, wondering how much fight she has left in her and whether her efforts have been in vain. The world, she bitterly notes, hasn’t gotten much better, and it’s not always possible to tell the good guys and the bad guys apart.

She and the others see themselves as a kind of nongovernmental humanitarian intervention force, though what they mostly do is kill people. This contradiction bothers Nile, and represents an ethical circle that “The Old Guard” doesn’t quite square. It’s nice to hear about the helpful things these immortals have done, but what we really want to see them do is throw punches, swing axes, break bones and blow stuff up.

Prince-Bythewood obliges, keeping the action fast and fierce and avoiding C.G.I.-heavy, overdone set pieces. She is a filmmaker who never condescends to her material, but whatever the genre — romantic comedy ( “Love & Basketball” ), coming-of-age story ( “The Secret Life of Bees” ) or show-business melodrama ( “Beyond the Lights” ) — her movies are anchored in humane, shrewd curiosity about the people they depict.

In this case, the emotional axis is the uneasy mentor-protégé bond between Andy and Nile. Andy is wise, but also weary, in danger of losing the sense of purpose that has sustained her for who knows how many years. Nile, for her part, has been drafted into a cause she didn’t choose and doesn’t understand, and she wavers between self-confidence and panic. Layne, a standout in Barry Jenkins’s “If Beale Street Could Talk,” is a quiet, intense presence, with a knack for the kind of small gesture — an eye-roll here, a shrug or a grimace there — that Prince-Bythewood has a knack for noticing.

The story — Rucka wrote the script — doesn’t feel wildly original, but it’s good enough to activate a lively interest in the characters. An ex-C.I.A. guy, Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), recruits the team for a mission that turns out to be a trap. That pharma boss, Merrick (Harry Melling), whose hooded sport coats are perfect signifiers of 21st-century rich-guy awfulness, wants to harvest immortal DNA for new medicines. The do-gooder veneer he puts on his megalomania fools nobody, except maybe Copley. You do hope that the anonymous gunmen Merrick employs have decent health insurance.

And also that future installments will build on the promise of this beginning, which suggests all kinds of possible developments. There’s a lot of back story to cover, and also various future conflicts within the old guard and between them and the rest of the world. I’m not usually someone to hope for sequels, but I guess if you live long enough …

The Old Guard Rated R. Plenty of killing. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. Watch on Netflix.

A.O. Scott is a critic at large and the co-chief film critic for The Times. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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The Old Guard Reviews

As one of the creators of the original comics, Greg Rucka delivers a screenplay packed with intriguing lore, which is well-explored and well-established for (what should be) the first movie in a new franchise.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Jul 24, 2023

Predictable and at times very, very boring, and the music makes it even more anti-climatic. I don't see a saving grace here. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Feb 1, 2023

On paper it looks like a carbon copy of Highlander but Theron... and a series of entertaining action set pieces that are directed with verve and style by director Gina Prince-Bythewood... prove you can teach The Old Guard new tricks.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 12, 2022

The themes and moral dilemmas presented are excessively contrite and manipulative while doing nothing to elevate the material from a below-average comic book picture.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 1, 2022

A new action-superhero mashup from Netflix that sounds a lot better than it ends up being.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 24, 2022

This epic about immortal soldiers on the lam gets extra points for innovation. Finally, a mainstream action movie features a gay couple as the romantic focal point.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 20, 2022

Gina Prince-Bythewood's The Old Guard is unlike any other movie based on a graphic novel. She gives us a steady stream of action and a storyline that never bores, and a welcome message about the power of goodness.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Feb 11, 2022

The immortals have a powerful female energy driving them forward, which is refreshing to see in a mainstream action film.

Full Review | Dec 7, 2021

Ambition is not always the best idea in your story. At this point we must know that not everything has to be at the cost of the entire world in action films. Universe-building harmed the story. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Oct 22, 2021

What saves The Old Guard from being just another cash grab is its dynamic fight scenes, coupled with the evaluation of both the delightful and destructive nature of time.

Full Review | Sep 14, 2021

If you like Highlander and 6 Underground, you're certainly in for a treat here, as Netflix's latest streaming blockbuster plays like a cross between the two.

Full Review | Aug 8, 2021

It's a slam-dunk of an action movie. The pace is brisk, the script is solid, the fight scenes brilliantly choreographed.

Full Review | Jul 30, 2021

Screenwriter Greg Rucka provides a well-conceived script, though a couple of characters make amazingly stupid choices...

Full Review | Jul 19, 2021

Watch the first 5 minutes of this new Netflix action movie starring Charlize Theron and you'll know literally everything that's going to happen.

Full Review | Jul 14, 2021

The Old Guard falls back on the familiar a bit too often, but the world it builds and its charismatic cast keep things interesting and offer plenty of potential, even if it doesn't spawn a franchise.

Full Review | Jul 13, 2021

Prince-Bythewood's direction is without reproach, as is the acting: The characters are nuanced and varied, the pacing balances fast and spectacular fight choreography with scenes that are almost meditative in their intimacy.

Delivered in between a series of flashy fight scenes - mostly played out to a lazy soundtrack of dance bangers - this punchy dialogue adds heft to the quieter moments.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 21, 2021

Great choreography and fight scenes make up for any of the flaws in the story.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 10, 2021

The Old Guard ends with a post-credits scene setting up another entry. For the first time in a good while, that feels like a promise rather than a threat.

Full Review | Jun 5, 2021

A clever-enough twist on the superhero genre to add a little hefty freshness to the genre.

Full Review | Mar 30, 2021

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Charlize Theron is better than the standard action in Netflix's The Old Guard: Review

Some actors excel at playing ordinary; Charlize Theron has never really been one of them. Even in rare (and excellent) outliers like Tully or Young Adult , there's always the sense that she’s biding her time, waiting for the moment her character can break free from some sad basement suburbia and get back to the business of slaying or saving the day.

In other words, squaring up for exactly the kind of role she takes on in The Old Guard , a movie that finds Theron once again playing a life form vastly superior to humans. As Andromach the Scythian — you can call her Andy — she’s the leader of a band of immortal warriors that includes Matthias Schoenaerts and If Beale Street Could Talk ’s KiKi Layne.

And she’s great at it, unsurprisingly, even if her lonely enforcer is rarely as fierce as Mad Max: Fury Road ’s Furiosa nor as fun as Atomic Blonde ’s platinum assassin (though her hair, chopped into a glossy chocolate pageboy, does bring back memories of Aeon Flux's iconic bob .)

Maybe that’s because poor Andy has spent a thousand-plus years fighting for justice and freedom, and now her worst foe is a peevish pharma bro ( Harry Potter ’s Harry Melling ) intent on forcibly extracting the warriors' deathless DNA for his own nefarious ends. Or maybe it’s that she, and we, have seen so much of this before.

Some fans literally have, at least on the page: Greg Rucka’s script is based on his own cult graphic-novel series of the same name, and he handles the basic mythology breezily enough in a few brief expository flashbacks that show how the crew came to be over millennia (a Crusades battle here, a little Napoleonic warfare there).

Layne's Nile is the new kid, a nervy young Marine who wakes up in an Afghan field hospital to find a fatal injury mysteriously healed; one moment it's a gaping flesh wound, the next it's disappearing like a time-lapsed kitten scratch. That makes her a convenient proxy for the audience, though the story doesn’t leave a lot of room to mourn the life she’s forced to leave behind.

Or to bring much nuance to the much-heralded queer romance between Guards Joe and Nicky (Marwan Kanzari and Luca Marinelli); mostly it just marks the spot — a happy flag planted for LGBTQ representation — and moves on. (Chiwetel Ejiofor, as the government agent in hot pursuit, also lingers at the edges, underused).

Which seems like even more of a shame considering the kind of intimate storytelling director Gina Prince-Bythewood hails from; her sensitive handling of romantic dramas like Beyond the Lights and Love & Basketball would seem to serve those areas of the film far better than it does its bloody but mostly quotidian fight scenes.

That leaves a movie that, beneath its strong female presence and few contemporary bits of flair, has a sort of inevitable bog-standard action feel, just entertaining enough in its live-die-repeat machinations to pass the engagement test.

But as the plot gallops toward its climactic showdown, it's hard not to wish for more of nearly everything but bullets: more banter, more backstory, more scale and visual wit. And more, too, of the fellow warrior (Van Veronica Ngo) who may have been Andy's only equal before cruel fate (or just a mean screenplay) stole her away.

If The Old Guard doesn't bring many new tricks, it does have what seems like a pretty sweet deal with Netflix; the final scene slyly opens the door to a sequel, and an opportunity mere mortals are rarely granted in the real world: the chance to rip it all up and start again. B-

The Old Guard begins streaming on Netflix July 10.

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Review: ‘The Old Guard,’ starring Charlize Theron, breathes fresh life into superhero cinema

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Buried deep in “The Old Guard,” Gina Prince-Bythewood’s swift, somber action-thriller, is an image to file under my worst nightmares and probably yours too: A captive named Quynh (Van Veronica Ngo) is locked inside a giant suit of armor, weighed down with chains and thrown into the ocean. It would be an unspeakably awful fate for anyone, but it’s even more so for Quynh, whose body miraculously self-regenerates after every scrape, every wound and, yes, every death. Trapped on the ocean floor for decades that become centuries, she drowns, revives, drowns again and revives again, her water-clogged screams a terrifying reminder that there are punishments infinitely worse than death.

That’s one of many hard truths that linger amid the whizzing bullets and slashing blades of “The Old Guard,” a pleasurably human-scaled movie about what it means to be superhuman. Does your heart sink at the last part of that description — or at the fact that this Netflix release was adapted from a series of graphic novels? I sympathize, but rest assured: While the comic-book-inspired superhero saga may be Hollywood’s most exhausted subgenre, mindless repetition is the last thing on Prince-Bythewood’s mind. Always good at infusing traditional material with emotional conviction and sly political purpose ( “Love & Basketball,” “Beyond the Lights” ), she here turns the very notion of overkill sneakily on its head.

The protagonist here isn’t Quynh but another powerful, deathless fighter named Andromache the Scythian, which must be fun to sign in autographs — or it would be if Andy, as she sensibly calls herself, weren’t so intent on staying incognito. Superbly played by Charlize Theron with the same regal ferocity she brought to “Mad Max: Fury Road” and “Atomic Blonde,” Andy is essentially the world’s oldest person: We see her in brief flashbacks to distant centuries, rocking a jeweled headdress and a heavy Boudicca vibe. These days, though, she favors a short black bob of hair and a wardrobe to match, the better to slip undetected through the shadows of history.

Andy leads a small, tough and very handsome team of fellow immortals who have intervened with quietly deadly force in some of humanity’s most momentous skirmishes. It took them a long time to find each other. Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts) served alongside Napoleon back in 1812. Nicky (Luca Marinelli) and Joe (Marwan Kenzari) once fought each other in the Crusades but have since become lovers. They haven’t shaken off all their ancient habits — swords remain among their weapons of choice — but they are ruthlessly efficient fighting machines, ready to kill and die and kill and die ad nauseam.

Turnover is low but not unheard-of, and fresh recruits don’t come along too often. But psychic visions have alerted Andy and her colleagues to a promising candidate named Nile (KiKi Layne, “If Beale Street Could Talk” ), a tough young U.S. Marine stationed in Afghanistan. Not long after recovering from what should have been a fatal injury, Nile learns that the life she once knew is over and that she is now the newest member of Andy’s posse. She is cast, in other words, in a familiar enough movie role: the wary outsider through whose eyes we will discover the mysterious workings of an exclusive subculture.

Nile is a fast learner, as Layne’s sharp-eyed performance makes clear. And what she learns, mainly, is that immortality can be a real drag. It isn’t easy for a movie to suggest that this particular gift might be more curse than blessing, or that those who possess it might be uniquely valuable, and thus vulnerable, to their most powerful enemies. But “The Old Guard,” adapted by Greg Rucka from his and Leandro Fernández’s comic-book series, teases out these philosophical quandaries with wry wit, gallows humor and an often grisly sense of the absurd.

It also allows for some fascinating corporeal spectacle, as Prince-Bythewood lingers, with real tenderness and grim fascination, on the wondrous sight of burn scars gradually vanishing and bullet wounds healing themselves. But she and her grunting, grimacing actors also direct our attention to the characters’ more lasting psychological scars. You feel the accumulated trauma of their every wound, every death, every resurrection. You also feel the weight of their solitude: To avoid capture, Andy and her friends must spend most of their long lives in isolation, joining forces only once every few years to do battle with the forces of evil.

Their latest mission places them in contact with a past associate (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who may not have their best interests at heart. An insufferably smug pharmaceuticals CEO (Harry Melling) definitely doesn’t; he wants to harness their powers and invent a kind of invincibility-conferring super-drug. Twists and betrayals pile up, along with abductions, rescues and vertiginous set pieces. But while Prince-Bythewood keeps the story moving and orchestrates some excitingly dynamic action (nimbly shot by Tami Reiker and Barry Ackroyd), it’s clear that her fascination with this story is less visceral than existential.

As a tale of immortality and its discontents, “The Old Guard” has obvious points of connection with the vast canon of vampire lore and literature. Andy and Nile, with their moving if initially combative teacher-student rapport, might remind you a little of Anne Rice’s Lestat and Louis. Nicky and Joe’s romantic ardor, undimmed by the passage of time, brings back warm memories of Jim Jarmusch’s “Only Lovers Left Alive.” (That movie ended in Morocco, which is where this one begins.) At the same time, the relaxed banter and non-nuclear family dynamics evoke any number of blockbuster reference points, from the “Fast and Furious” movies to the extended Marvel and DC Comics fraternities. Perhaps the most obvious genre antecedent here is “X-Men’s” Wolverine, another hero cursed with self-healing properties.

“Just because we keep living doesn’t mean we stop hurting,” Booker says, a line that the soft-eyed Schoenaerts nearly rescues from banality. “The Old Guard,” though a good deal more interesting than some of the movies to which it will be compared, doesn’t entirely sidestep their weaknesses, among them on-the-nose dialogue, fuzzy backstory and a conveniently selective regard for human life. For all its thoughtfulness about the peculiar metaphysics of life and death, this is still a movie in which the heroes wind up killing an awful lot of anonymous henchmen — and unlike them, those henchmen stay dead.

There’s nothing particularly objectionable about this dynamic, which mirrors that of countless action movies in which the baddies are expendable and the good guys are for all intents and purposes invincible. We accept it for the same reason we accept a lot of these movies, because the characters are vaguely coded as a force for good in the world. It’s easy enough to believe that about Andy and her friends — the actors’ charm goes a long way — but you can’t help longing for a deeper understanding of who they are, the causes they’ve fought for, the regimes they’ve aided and resisted. I mean that as both criticism and compliment. It’s the rare superhero movie in 2020 that can leave you wanting to see more, closing-credits kicker and all.

‘The Old Guard’

Rated: R, for sequences of graphic violence, and language Running time: 2 hours, 4 minutes Playing: Available July 10 on Netflix

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Charlize Theron in ‘The Old Guard’ on Netflix: Film Review

In a watchable franchise wannabe, Charlize Theron leads a team of immortals who are also B-movie renegades.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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There’s a thing you can always count on in blockbuster movie culture: If a popcorn genre hangs around long enough, after a while it’s going to merge with another popcorn genre it seemingly has nothing to do with. That’s what happened when “Kingsman: Secret Service” (2014) fused the setting and attitude of a James Bond thriller with the fanciful bang-bang-ballet-in-the-air action of a superhero movie.

It happens again in “ The Old Guard .” Adapted from the 2017 graphic novel by Greg Rucka (who wrote the screenplay), the movie is about a team of crime-fighting immortals whose flesh can repair itself from bullet wounds and knife stabs like something out of an “X-Men” film. But they’re also a down-and-dirty crew of leather-jacketed renegades who find a way to do maximum damage with machine guns and windpipe-smashing moves like something out of a Jason Statham payback special. You could call them The I-Team (I for “immortal”). You could also call the film “X-Men: The Expendables Edition.”

The leader of this posse of ageless commandos is Andromache of Scythia, known as Andy ( Charlize Theron ), who we meet in Morocco, where she’s wearing Ray-Bans and a black T-shirt and a sharply edged dark-brown version of a late-’70s David Bowie coif. She looks like a refugee from a motorcycle commercial, which makes you think the film is going to be some convoluted exercise in numbingly abstract action iconography. But “The Old Guard,” if anything, goes in the opposite direction; it’s like an immortal-mercenary hangout movie. Chunks of the picture are logy and formulaic (it dawdles on for two hours), but the director, Gina Prince-Bythewood (making a major lane change after “Love & Basketball” and “The Secret Life of Bees”), stages the fight scenes with ripe executionary finesse, and she teases out a certain soulful quality in her cast.

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According to the film’s theology of invincibility, each team member was killed at a certain moment in history, only to wake up and learn that from that point on they would be immortal. Andy is the oldest — she can’t even remember how long she’s been at this — and Theron, as cuttingly fierce as you want her to be (especially when she’s wielding a circular medieval Asian slicing weapon), acts like someone who’s bone-tired after a millennia or two of fighting evil; the dream of immortality has become her cross to bear. Matthias Schoenaerts plays Booker, who was killed fighting for Napoleon, as a melancholy loner spinning through history. And Marwan Kenzari and Luca Marinelli are Joe and Nicky, a swarthy duo who died while dueling in the Crusades and have been lovers through the centuries. That’s part of the film’s rousingly inclusive approach to the action genre.

The other part is the casting of KiKi Layne as Nile, a Marine who gets her throat slashed by a Taliban leader during the war in Afghanistan. One day later, she’s all better, marking her as the first new member of the I-Team since 1812. Layne’s performance is the most resonant in the film. She plays Nile as a surly, desperate, human-sized outsider who’s distinctly unenthused about joining her new warrior colleagues in a life that never ends. She’s so not with the program, and that gives the moment she agrees to get with it a charge of actual drama.

“The Old Guard” is at once a conventional action thriller; an origin story that’s trying, in its utilitarian Netflix way, to launch a badass franchise; and an “elegiac” late episode of that same franchise. It’s a genre movie that, if anything, takes its characters a lot more seriously than the audience does. Floating through the years with hidden identities, Andy and her team are presented to us as stealth saviors who really, really care. Andy, explaining the game of immortality to Nile, says things like, “It’s not what time steals. It’s what it leaves behind.” (A line like that can leave the pulse of a movie behind.)

The way “The Old Guard” works, immortality lasts until it doesn’t. The film has a passing-the-baton-to-a-representative-of-the-new-world plot that echoes “Terminator: Dark Fate” and “Logan.” The villain, Merrick, runs a pharmaceutical corporation and is played by Harry Melling (from the “Harry Potter” films) as if he were the evil grandson of Malcolm McLaren. His plan is to kidnap our heroes and learn the secrets of immortality by mining their flesh for its genetic secrets. Merrick’s middleman, Copley, is played by Chiwetel Ejiofor , an actor who never fails to surprise. Here, he goes from villain to soul-haunted collaborator to the film’s equivalent of a certain character with an eyepatch in a way that’s entirely convincing, even as he barely moves a facial muscle. Will “The Old Guard” be successful enough to spawn a sequel? If it is, the challenge going forward will be to make the prospect of immortality seem like something more than a rerun.

Reviewed online, July 2, 2020. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 125 MIN.

• Production: A Netflix release of a Skydance, Denver + Delilah Productions production. Producers: AJ Dix, David Ellison, Marc Evans, Dana Goldberg, Don Granger, Beth Kono, Charlize Theron. Executive producers: Stan Wlodkowski, Greg Rucka.
• Crew: Director: Gina Prince-Bythewood. Screenplay: Greg Rucka. Camera: Barry Ackroyd, Tami Reiker. Editor: Terilyn A. Shropshire. Music: Volker Bertelmann, Dustin O’Halloran.
• With: Charlize Theron, Chiwetel Ejiofor, KiKi Layne, Matthias Schoenaerts, Marwan Kenzari, Luca Marinelli, Harry Melling.

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Pop Culture Happy Hour

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'The Old Guard' Is A Smart Blend Of Action And Emotion

Linda Holmes

KiKi Layne, Luca Marinelli, Charlie Theron, and Marwan Kenzari are part of The Old Guard in Netflix's film of the same name. Netflix hide caption

KiKi Layne, Luca Marinelli, Charlie Theron, and Marwan Kenzari are part of The Old Guard in Netflix's film of the same name.

There's a moment in the wonderful 2000 romance Love And Basketball when Monica and Quincy, college sweethearts who are both athletes, sit on a dorm-room bed together, recovering from their bruises. Their bodies are tangled and facing in opposite directions, with her hand holding ice on his belly and his holding ice on her ankle. The camera looks at the little drops of water on his skin and on hers, and we hear the crinkle of her bag of ice as she gently wiggles it back and forth. It's an extraordinary moment of intimacy, both because of the way it communicates the foundations of the relationship — its nurture and trust — and because of the way it displays the inherent vulnerability of bodies and what a critical part of humanity they represent.

Gina Prince-Bythewood wrote and directed that scene, and in the last 20 years she's directed television like Shots Fired and other films like Beyond The Lights . But this was the scene I kept coming back to while watching the very good Netflix action thriller The Old Guard , starring Charlize Theron, which Prince-Bythewood directed from a script by Greg Rucka, adapting the comics he created with artist Leandro Fernandez.

Code Switch

Director gina prince-bythewood: it's time to 'obliterate the term black film'.

It might not be obvious, the connection between young lovers sprawled on a bed and a team of fighters against injustice. And particularly in this case, injured athletes aren't an obvious analogue because — and this is where I acknowledge that I am going to spoil the premise of the comics and the film — these are people who have lived many lifetimes, who cannot die. Or, rather, they die and they come back. Not just once, but over and over. For centuries; for longer.

Here's a quandary: How do you make a compelling movie — one with a good measure of fairly graphic violence, by the way — about a group of heroes who can't be killed? Don't they always have the upper hand? Won't they always win? There are clever ways that the story itself gets around this problem, but it's also absolutely critical that it's in the hands of a director who understands, and can convey on film, that link between physical vulnerability and humanity. Because one of the things this story is about is that even if you do not die, the pain of cycling through injury after injury, recovery after recovery, reconstitution after reconstitution of your being, is a hard way to exist.

It's a story that's partly about the attrition of your spirit that can come from being, very literally, a "survivor." And particularly because new recruit Nile (KiKi Layne, whom you know from If Beale Street Could Talk ) is a black woman and two of her teammates are men who fell in love after being on opposite sides of The Crusades (which is a witty idea, let's be honest), there is additional subtext here about the churn of violence and the costs of enduring it. Moreover, in a world seized with emergencies that activists are scrambling to address, it is frustrating enough when you feel like years have passed and all the attempts you have made to improve the world have come to nothing. What would it be like to feel that for centuries? For longer? Would you really want the long view? How much perspective could you stand to have about humanity?

More immediately, the plot is this: Andy (Theron) has been doing this the longest. She wants out of the hero business, really, but she can't escape. She's pulled into a job with teammates Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli). The job, conveyed to them by a man named Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is to rescue a group of kidnapped girls in South Sudan. How can they say no? When it turns out there's more to the job than meets the eye, she's confronted by the fact that there are people out there who know about her and her team and wish them no good.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, Nile is a young soldier consumed with the wars of the present, and shortly after she discovers that something is very unusual about her response to injury, she winds up in the company of the Old Guard. (They don't go around calling themselves that, by the way; it would be very corny. And they don't do it.)

Seeking Empathy, 'Shots Fired' Creators Flip The Script On Police Shootings

This is the first film I've seen in quarantine that felt to me like a proper big summer movie — and yet it transcends so much of what's sometimes been disappointing about that category. Yes, it's a comic book movie. Yes, it's an action movie. Yes, it's about a team of good-doers. And it's exciting and satisfying and tense and all those things. But everything from its queer couple to its leading women to its director to its thoughtfulness to its point of view about violence makes it such a welcome addition. So often, films accept the idea that slaughter — when a character believes it's righteous — comes easily and seems normal once the action realm has been entered. Here, no: Here, Nile is horrified by a sequence that would be just another set piece in so many movies. She's not excited the way Spider-Man is excited about joining the Avengers. She's coming to terms with a future she never asked for, and with the implications it has for the life she had before all this started.

There were moments in The Old Guard when I literally just muttered, "Gina Prince-Bythewood, man." Seriously. Because I have admired the way she shoots bodies in love scenes for ages; the way she makes skin seem warm and eyes seem lit from the inside. When I saw Beyond The Lights , I wrote that she had "an uncommonly fine touch when shooting not just sex but other scenes of physical contact and closeness, which give the film a sense of intimacy and gravity." As it turns out, that skill translates brilliantly to action, and the logic that someone who can shoot sex well can shoot action well should probably be followed more often. There's a moment when Nile is isolated, breathing deeply and listening to Frank Ocean in her earbuds, that reminded me keenly of Gugu Mbatha-Raw in Beyond The Lights , not just because they're both black women being filmed and seen in a tactile and radiant way black women often aren't in popular American film, but because the same director brings the same sense of vulnerable but durable physicality to both portrayals.

Not to be lost in this is how strong some of these performances are. This is a terrific deployment of the talents of Charlize Theron, sleek and knowing and fully in charge, swinging an axe and shooting a gun in a way that will satisfy anybody who secretly enjoys, just a little, those, "oooooh, yuck " moments in films like John Wick . (This is a pretty bloody movie. Please know that going in.) Layne is in a very different gear from the serene presence she was in Beale Street , but she's very good in this role that balances what we might call bad-assery with conscience and internal conflicts. Theron and Layne are also both funny together in the welcome moments of push and pull that are common to every story of the grizzled old veteran and the new recruit.

If you've got a big TV (or even a little one), there's plenty to watch; you know that. I know that. But if you miss the blockbuster and the star vehicle and the big action sequence, and if you want something that can be all those things while still having humanity and thought and a point of view, this is your film. And it comes from one of our great directors, who's been showing us for ages the cycle of injury and recovery, and who knows it will probably always be with us.

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Netflix’s The Old Guard Is Breathtaking

There’s always something exciting (and more than a little nerve-racking) about a director with a distinctive voice taking on a new film genre. Think Robert Altman doing noir with The Long Goodbye , or Terrence Malick making a war movie with The Thin Red Line . Or, more recently, Taika Waititi tackling a superhero flick with Thor: Ragnarok . So while Gina Prince-Bythewood, previously best known for the sublimely romantic Love & Basketball and Beyond the Lights , might not seem like the first choice for a comic-book movie about a group of immortal superheroes who’ve been fighting evil for centuries, just a few minutes into The Old Guard you realize what an inspired choice she turns out to be.

And the scene that initially does it — I am not making this up — involves Charlize Theron guessing the provenance of a mysterious piece of baklava. Her character, Andy, once better known as Andromache of Scythia, has been around for about 6,000 years, having fought (and died, and come back) in hundreds and probably thousands of battles all over the world. Along the way, she has been worshipped as a god, burned as a witch, and hung out with Auguste Rodin. But right now, she sits with her small team of fellow ancient warriors (the other three have been around for merely hundreds of years) and plays a parlor game: They give her a piece of baklava; she has to use her eternity of experience to figure out where it’s from. It’s the kind of scene that would be an offhand moment in any other film or played for laughs. (Think the Avengers and their shawarma.) As directed by Prince-Bythewood, however, it’s warm, observant, quiet — and hence immersive. For a minute or so, nothing else matters in the world other than Charlize Theron and that piece of baklava.

Adapted by Greg Rucka, who created the original 2017 comic along with illustrator Leandro Fernández, The Old Guard is filled with such human moments, both frivolous and profound — quiet reveries, declarations of love, dreams about eternity, regrets over families and loves left behind and lost forever — and in the balance of the film, they hold equal weight with the action scenes, because ultimately everything feels connected.

Everybody feels connected too. Unlike the standard superhero team, the Old Guard themselves seem less like a collection of traits and more like real people. There’s a shared despair, largely unspoken, between Theron’s Andy and Matthias Schoenaerts’s Booker, a former Napoleonic army officer: Andy has seen so much loss in her many millennia, while Booker, relatively new to the immortality thing, is still working out his grief; somehow her numbness and his rawness land them both in the same uncomfortable place of wanting out of this life. Meanwhile, Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicolo (Luca Marinelli) are former combatants from the Crusades who are now lovers as well as brothers-in-arms, two men whose passion is fueled partly by the fact that, before they fell for each other, they killed each other over and over again. What an interesting idea that is! And how refreshing that the movie knows it and leans into it. All these characters really do feel as if they’ve known one another for centuries, with all the complexity — the bitterness and sacrifice and loyalty — that suggests. Into this team comes Nile (KiKi Layne), a young Marine who discovers her own immortality in Afghanistan and whose response to her strange new power is, at least at first, a combination of loneliness, confusion, and shame.

When I profiled Prince-Bythewood recently , it became clear that the quality of being present in a scene lies at the heart of all her work. What makes Love & Basketball and Beyond the Lights so special isn’t just their romanticism but their patience. The director’s camera diligently observes her characters without rushing them along to the next big narrative or emotional climax. That kind of intimacy obviously comes in handy when you’re telling a love story, but when it’s transferred to the realm of comic books and superheroes, a different kind of alchemy occurs: A supernatural action fantasy starts to feel heartbreakingly real. So even though the plot of The Old Guard isn’t particularly novel — a sociopathic young pharma bro (Harry Melling) with a small private army attempts to harvest our heroes’ powers — we find ourselves deeply invested in their predicament, however by-the-numbers it may look on paper.

That’s not to suggest that The Old Guard doesn’t also kick all sorts of ass in the ways it’s supposed to. The combat has been creatively choreographed, and these men and women really do fight with the kind of speed, fluidity, and inventiveness you might expect from people who’ve been doing so for a long, long time, using cool weapons and cool martial-arts moves you shouldn’t try at home but will probably want to. That the film never has to rely on choppy editing to cover up for bad action is an additional blessing. (It helps, of course, to have Theron, who has already proved herself an elegant cinematic bruiser with roles in Mad Max: Fury Road and Atomic Blonde .) For all the film’s brooding, it goes down easy. It’s enormously fun, but it won’t give you the kind of candy headache so many other superhero movies do nowadays.

Speaking of which: In ordinary times, The Old Guard (which is produced by Netflix, though a theatrical release was always planned) would have opened in a crowded marketplace that had already seen titles like Wonder Woman 1984 , Black Widow , a ninth Fast & Furious entry (also co-starring Theron), and The New Mutants . There are still plenty of pictures coming out, but since those big comic-book and comic-book-adjacent films have moved off the release schedule , The Old Guard now has an important corner of the market all to itself. Watching it, I don’t miss those other movies with their shared universes and painstakingly built, vigilantly managed worlds. I watch The Old Guard and try to imagine a new world, one where other comic-book movies are this well made and breathtaking.

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Summary Led by a warrior named Andy (Charlize Theron), a covert group of tight-knit mercenaries with a mysterious inability to die have fought to protect the mortal world for centuries. But when the team is recruited to take on an emergency mission and their extraordinary abilities are suddenly exposed, it’s up to Andy and Nile (Kiki Layne), the ... Read More

Directed By : Gina Prince-Bythewood

Written By : Greg Rucka, Leandro Fernandez

The Old Guard

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Charlize Theron

Matthias Schoenaerts

Marwan Kenzari

Luca Marinelli

Chiwetel Ejiofor

Harry Melling

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Natacha Karam

Mette Narrative

Anamaria Marinca

Dr meta kozak.

Micheal Ward

Majid essaidi.

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The old guard, common sense media reviewers.

Smart female-led action saga has heart; violence, language.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Good triumphs over evil. Individual integrity, cou

Team players (male and female) are brave, compassi

Tons of gory action violence. Heroes are pitted ag

A kiss. A couple is in a (very) long-term committe

Occasional profanity includes "f--k," "a--hole," "

Social drinking by adults. One hero carries a flas

Parents need to know that The Old Guard is a fast-paced, gory action-adventure movie with two brave, highly skilled women (Charlize Theron and KiKi Layne) in the lead roles. It's based on Greg Rucka's graphic novels about a small team of immortals who travel the world over the centuries to help humanity…

Positive Messages

Good triumphs over evil. Individual integrity, courage, and behavior can generate positive social change. Values promoted include loyalty, a passionate commitment to helping others, gender and ethnic equality, compassion, resourcefulness.

Positive Role Models

Team players (male and female) are brave, compassionate, moral, determined, loyal, smart. Sympathetic characters make mistakes but learn from them. Ethnic and gender diversity throughout, as well as LGBTQ representation. Stereotypical greedy, power-hungry villain is from the pharmaceutical industry.

Violence & Scariness

Tons of gory action violence. Heroes are pitted against hordes of mercenaries and villains. Intense battles, individual hand-to-hand combat, point-blank gunfire. Weaponry includes machine guns, knives, grenades, handguns, ax, swords. Characters bleed, suffer, die. Bodies are strewn on the ground. Lengthy close-ups of fatal wounds. Characters are kidnapped and held captive. A person struggles to escape from an underwater tomb.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A kiss. A couple is in a (very) long-term committed relationship.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Occasional profanity includes "f--k," "a--hole," "s--t," "pissed off."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Social drinking by adults. One hero carries a flask and sometimes drinks excessively. A scene takes place on an airplane with drugs and drug smugglers.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Old Guard is a fast-paced, gory action-adventure movie with two brave, highly skilled women (Charlize Theron and KiKi Layne) in the lead roles. It's based on Greg Rucka's graphic novels about a small team of immortals who travel the world over the centuries to help humanity. Frequently, their mission involves battles and fighting, so expect lots of violent sequences of bloody battles and their aftermath, both in the present and in historical flashbacks. Dead and wounded bodies abound. Weaponry includes guns (both handguns and automatics), swords, grenades, knives, an ax, and brutal hand-to-hand combat. The lead characters can heal from even the gravest wounds (like Deadpool and Wolverine): Their gruesome, should-be-fatal injuries are shown often. Occasional profanity includes "f--k," "s--t," and "a--hole." There's one kiss. Adults drink in social settings, and one man carries a flask that he sometimes drinks from. A scene set on a plane involves illegal drugs. Underneath all of the fighting and blood are strong themes of teamwork, loyalty, integrity, perseverance, and courage. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (12)
• Kids say (24)

Based on 12 parent reviews

Pretty Pathetic - Too many loose ends

Fantastic film, amazing role models, what's the story.

In THE OLD GUARD, a masterfully skilled, courageous team of immortal warriors agree to a dangerous rescue in modern day. Unfortunately, once Andy ( Charlize Theron ), Booker ( Matthias Schoenaerts ), Nicky (Luca Marinelli), and Joe ( Marwan Kenzari ) arrive in South Sudan to liberate schoolchildren held hostage, they discover their task was a ruse. They've been set up by Copley ( Chiwetel Ejiofor ), a man who identified himself as a highly placed security agent when he sought their help. The team narrowly escapes but is now aware of imminent danger. At the same time, their extraordinary senses let them know that another immortal has appeared on earth, the first in more than 200 years. Nile ( KiKi Layne ), a U.S. Marine serving in Afghanistan, must be extracted from her military base and made a part of their small band. At first, Nile is confused, horrified, and disbelieving, but ultimately the team of four becomes five. Their mission now is to find Copley and determine how their immortality was detected and stop those who have made them targets.

Is It Any Good?

Dazzling action, an intriguing story, and talented actors make this female-driven adventure well worth the time; the writing and some thought-provoking notions about immortality make it special. Gina Prince-Bythewood , now the first Black woman to direct a big-budget actioner, delivers on both grand and intimate scales. The device of introducing a novice who needs to be schooled in the whys, wheres, and hows of the characters' origins works wonderfully well; the audience absorbs the backstory along with the newbie. And, though The Old Guard is based on a series of graphic novels, it's played with straightforward honesty and intimacy, not the often tongue-in-cheek tone of most comic book superhero tales.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the violence in The Old Guard . What emotions does the brutality evoke? Is it exciting or horrifying, or both? How does the fact that two of the movie's action heroes (Andy and Nile) are skilled and successful women change existing female stereotypes? Why is it important to understand how the violence in the film may impact kids ?

Pick one of the members of The Old Guard team. What valuable character strengths (i.e., perseverance, courage, integrity) does that team member have? Then, pick one of those strengths and show why it was important to her or to him.

The final scene of this movie, along with other carefully integrated hints, lets the audience know that there will be a sequel to The Old Guard . What were some of those clues? Would you want to see more stories about The Old Guard ? Why or why not? What can you expect to see next time? How do you think companies decide whether or not to create a sequel or sequels?

The Old Guard 's tagline is: "Forever is harder than it looks." How does the movie explain this statement?

Movie Details

• On DVD or streaming : July 10, 2020
• Cast : Charlize Theron , KiKi Layne , Matthias Schoenaerts , Chiwetel Ejiofor
• Director : Gina Prince-Bythewood
• Inclusion Information : Female directors, Black directors, Female actors, Black actors
• Studio : Netflix
• Genre : Action/Adventure
• Topics : Adventures , Great Girl Role Models , History
• Character Strengths : Courage , Integrity , Perseverance , Teamwork
• Run time : 118 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : sequences of graphic violence and language
• Last updated : February 18, 2023

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The Old Guard Review

10 Jul 2020

The Old Guard

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.

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• DVD & Streaming

The Old Guard

• Action/Adventure , Drama , Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Content Caution

In Theaters

• Charlize Theron as Andy; KiKi Layne as Nile; Matthias Schoenaerts as Booker; Marwan Kenzari as Joe; Luca Marinelli as Nicky; Chiwetel Ejiofor as Copley; Harry Melling as Merrick

Home Release Date

• July 10, 2020
• Gina Prince-Bythewood

Distributor

Movie review.

They’re the best at what they do, Andy’s little band. And they’ll do whatever is asked of them—if the cause, and the price, is right. They slide into a country like a blade of smoke. They rescue who they can, kill who they must, and poof , they’re gone.

They see themselves as the good guys. “We fight for what we think is right,” says Nicky, one of the group’s members. But lately, team leader Andy wonders whether they’re doing any good at all. For all their efforts, the world’s getting worse, not better. And Andy’s had enough.

“The world can burn, for all I care,” she says.

But if the world did burn, these four teammates— spoiler alert —might be the only people left standing.

Yes, Andy’s team is indeed the best at what they do. They’re quick, strong and lethal. Also, immortal. That helps in their line of work.

Oh, they’ll die eventually . Every living thing does, they’ll point out. But until their time comes, their bodies spit out bullets, patch up stab wounds and stitch together broken bones quicker than Starbucks brews your latte. Any number of people would kill to get their hands on their secret … if anyone knew about it.

But now, it seems as though someone does know. After Andy’s team is brutally ambushed in the South Sudan—with the whole attack recorded on video—Andy knows their secret is out. No longer are they the hunters: Now someone’s hunting them .

And that’s not all. Just as Andy and her team realize (through a subconscious dream connection) that they’re in someone’s crosshairs, they learn there’s another immortal out there—one who just discovered it herself. In her dreams, Andy sees the woman clearly: a soldier serving in Afghanistan.

She’s the first immortal to appear in, what, 200 years?

“Not another one,” Andy huffs. “Not now.”

But she has no choice but to deal with it. While Andy directs the rest of her team to find their pursuers, she goes after the new immortal herself. The woman’s going to want answers, after all. She’s confused, maybe scared. And given how people often react to folks who rise from the dead ( Zombie! Vampire! ), she might be in a little danger herself. (As much as an immortal person can be, at least.)

Plus, given the unknown threat that faces her team, another trigger finger couldn’t hurt.

Positive Elements

You get jaded after a few hundred years of battling baddies. Andy and her team may fight for what they believe is right, but several centuries of seeing humankind’s worst sides can make even the best of them question their priorities.

But Nile—the new girl—is free from centuries of world-weary cynicism. She’s still shaken by the fact that she killed a man—even though the same man “killed” her. She protects and sacrifices for her fellow teammates. She longs to talk with her family again, and she praises how her mother raised her.

“She fought for us,” Nile tells Andy of her mother. “Never backed down. Never let us back down, either.”

Nile’s presence seems to remind Andy of her own essential humanity. Though Andy can’t even remember what her family looked like after all this time (and she was born in an age long before someone could just snap a picture), she understands the longing that Nile has for her family. And it leads Andy to a rather unexpected, and sacrificial, decision.

That said, all of the team members seem willing to sacrifice for each other. And even when we do see someone commit a highly ungenerous act, he does so because of a painful past experience.

We should also note that even the bad guys don’t necessarily have completely bad motives. Andy’s team is being pursued by a pharmaceutical company hoping to save and elongate the lives of millions. Sure, Merrick, the company’s CEO, seems more motivated by profits than philanthropy. But others—propelled by the suffering they’ve seen in their own families—sincerely (if misguidedly) believe that capturing and experimenting on Andy and her team can somehow still serve the greater good. In the end, though, the film repudiates that idea, reminding us that good intents can’t justify evil actions.

[Spoiler Warning] While Andy questions whether her team is doing good or not, someone tracking their history knows they are—and just how much. Andy will save a child, for instance, and that child grows up to invent an important vaccine. A rescued family eventually spawns someone who saved hundreds from the Khmer Rouge. “She saves a life, and two or three generations later, we reap the benefits,” he says. It’s almost as if they’re on a divine mission, saving certain people to keep humanity’s epic story on track. And speaking of which …

Spiritual Elements

… Nile is a Christian. After she comes back to life, we see her sitting on a cot, holding the cross hanging around her neck thoughtfully. And when she and Andy take a rickety plane back to the rest of Andy’s team, Nile bows her head.

“Are you praying?” Andy says with a laugh. “God doesn’t exist.”

“ My God does,” Nile insists.

Andy’s not moved. She dismisses the whole idea of a divine hand and mocks Nile for her faith. She says that once upon a time, she was worshipped as a god, and she’s seen enough horrific stuff to dismiss the idea of a protective Creator. Nothing means anything, Andy insists, though she admits that their own immortality is hard to explain.

“You should just keep following that illogic,” Andy says. “You’re already on board with the supernatural.”

Andy did have a bad experience with Christian believers back in the day. As she and an immortal friend tried to save some people accused of witchcraft sometime during the Middle Ages, they were naturally accused of being witches themselves. The fact that they couldn’t be killed “proved” their pact with the devil. As the two wait to be burned at the stake, a bunch of soldiers with a priest barge in and separate the two.

“For creatures such as you, there is no salvation,” the priest says, holding a huge wooden cross, taking one of the immortals out of the cell.

Andy’s team hides out in an old, deserted church (and does lots of killing there). One teammate, Nicky, prays before battle and tells passing villagers, “Peace be with you.” He insists that their lives, and their collective partnership, were “meant” to happen. Turns out, he and fellow team member Joe both fought in the Crusades—though on opposite sides.

“The love of my life was of the people I’d been taught to hate,” Nicky says. Which leads us to our next section.

Sexual Content

Nicky and Joe are lovers, and have been monogamously so for hundreds of years. “This man is more than you could ever know” when someone asks Joe if Nicky is his “boyfriend.” “His kiss still thrills me even after millennia.” Nicky calls his beau an “incurable romantic,” and the two men share a lingering kiss. We also see the couple waking up (fully clothed) in bed together.

This gay relationship is the only confirmed romance we see in the film—though when Nile spies a bare-breasted statue crafted by the famous artist Rodin, Andy admits that she knew the guy. “Probably biblically,” quips Booker, the fourth member of the team. We see a bit of cleavage, and some men are sometimes seen shirtless.

Andy’s team is sent to rescue a handful of kidnapped girls. “The youngest is 8. The oldest, 13,” someone tells Andy. Though it’s never expressed explicitly, we assume these girls will soon be separated and sold as part of a human trafficking ring.

Violent Content

After Andy kills a score of would-be attackers (to Nile’s appalled amazement), Booker tells her, “That woman has forgotten more ways to kill than whole armies will ever know.”

Perhaps the movie serves as a refresher course for Andy, because things then turn remarkably bloody.

Dozens upon dozens upon dozens of non-immortal humans are slaughtered—often, but not always, quickly. Most are dispatched via a bullet to the head (or a few to the chest), and a few fatalities are accompanied by briefs splashes of blood. Others have their throats cut. One man has the arteries in his legs swiftly and silently severed.

But some don’t die so easily. After a drawn-out fight, a man lands on his head and grotesquely snaps his neck. Andy sends an axe into another man’s neck, the weapon sticking partly out. A man falls to his death. In a flashback, we see a fellow with a horrific injury to his midsection slowly bleed out (blood burbling out of his mouth, as well).

But as bad as those injuries might be, they look fairly tame to those suffered by our damage-resistant immortals.

One takes a grenade explosion to his midsection; flesh and blood mix with what looks like hints of intestine, and the rest of his body looks bloodily mangled, too. (Even that, though, isn’t enough to keep him unconscious for more than a minute or so.) Another suffers a gunshot through the mouth: While we don’t see the shot itself, we do see the blood and gore as he revives.

Bone breaks are particularly grotesque, with slivers often sticking straight out of the skin (or, in one case, turning a set of fingers into practically a pipe-cleaner sculpture made by a preschooler) before the breaks heal without any long-standing damage.

Elsewhere, a throat is grotesquely slit. A brain is filled with a bullet. Characters are stabbed repeatedly and sometimes appear dead, their faces covered in blood and bodies pocked with wounds. One is injected with a massive, painful needle.

Our immortal protagonists take in more lead than a pencil factory. In flashback, we learn that one met a terrible “end.” The immortal was locked in an iron coffin and dumped into the ocean, destined to drown and revive and drown again until the end of time. (“It’s the reason we dread capture,” Nicky tells Nile. “[We don’t want to] spend eternity in a cage.”)

The recovery can be almost as ooky, with bodies squeezing bullets out of the wounds. And while Andy’s team may be immortal, every injury still causes pain. Nile finds this out herself when she sticks her hand in a burning fire, and she pulls it out covered, temporarily, by blisters.

People are punched and kicked, too. We see someone suffer from a cruel illness, and we hear about others in the same boat. Newspapers and press clippings tell of some old bloody incidents, while televised news reports describe some new ones. A plane nearly crashes. Someone jumps off a moving train. Merrick says that his company just released a drug that will save hundreds of thousands of lives … though the process killed a quarter of a million mice. When he views footage of the immortals at work, he calls the footage a “$2 million snuff film.”

Crude or Profane Language

Seven f-words and about 20 s-words. We also hear “a–,” “b–ch,” “d–n,” “h—,” “sucks” and “p-ssed.” God’s name is misused twice (once with “d–n”), and Jesus’ name is abused three times.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Andy guzzles quite a bit of vodka on a plane. Nile speculates that Andy drugged her to make her think that she’d died. A man staggers to his apartment, obviously drunk, and lets a whisky bottle fall from his hand. (It breaks on the floor.) People drink wine with dinner.

Merrick hopes to use the immortals’ DNA to craft life-saving, or life-extending drugs, and he brags how successful his scientists have been in creating lifechanging drugs in the past.

Other Negative Elements

Nile vomits. Andy threatens a would-be partner.

The Old Guard may feel fresh and new. But in some ways, it’s the same old story.

Anchored by a strong performance by Charlize Theron, Netflix’s latest actioner (based on a comic book of the same name) is one of the more intense, intriguing, throwaway action movies you’ll see during this COVID-interrupted movie season. It’s also among the bloodiest.

The violence here is frenetic, the gore unremitting. A same-sex relationship between two of our heroes could cause another swath of would-be viewers to push pause. And while the film offers some odd-but-resonant nods to God and transcendent purpose here, it’s not enough to redeem The Old Guard’ s failings.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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The Old Guard review – Charlize Theron has an axe to grind

Theron lets rip as immortal warrior Andy in Gina Prince Bythewood’s fast-paced but patchy comic-book adaptation

W ho wants to live for ever? Not Charlize Theron , evidently. Playing immortal warrior Andy, leader of a covert band of unkillable mercenaries, Theron spends almost as much time battling many centuries worth of accumulated angst as she does slicing and dicing entire battalions of attackers. Armed with ennui and an ancient axe, Theron brings layers of complexity to a role that is otherwise largely defined through exemplary fight choreography.

Gina Prince-Bythewood ’s crisp, efficient direction of this adaptation of an action-fantasy comic-book series by Greg Rucka serves the physical element of the performances well. A fight on a rattling cargo plane between Theron and KiKi Layne (playing Nile, a reluctant new recruit to the immortal club) is a blast. Even Andy cracks a smile at one point. “She stabbed me,” Theron’s character later tells her right-hand man, Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts). “I think she has potential.”

Where the film is less well supported is in the screenplay, which Rucka himself adapted, and which gets bogged down in some decidedly muddy character motivation at a crucial point. Equally tone deaf is a score that sidesteps the timelessness of the central characters, feeling more disposable than eternal. Still, there’s plenty to enjoy, not least Layne’s terrific turn as the newbie with a fresh take on forever.

The Old Guard is on Netflix

• Action and adventure films
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• Charlize Theron
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Screen Rant

The old guard review: netflix's movie delivers truly thrilling action.

What The Old Guard lacks in well-paced, tightly plotted story, it more than makes up for with compelling characters and slick, thrilling fight scenes.

Comic book superhero movies have been popular for long enough now that Hollywood studios have turned to the less well-known properties in an effort to launch new potential franchises, and The Old Guard falls into this category. Based on the same-named comic book series created by Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernández, the movie follows a group of mercenaries who are actually ageless immortals that heal from all their wounds - even those that would be fatal. Gina Prince-Bythewood ( Beyond the Lights , Cloak & Dagger ) directs the movie from a script penned by Rucka himself. What The Old Guard lacks in well-paced, tightly plotted story, it more than makes up for with compelling characters and slick, thrilling fight scenes.

The Old Guards follows Andy (Charlize Theron), a thousands-of-years-old immortal warrior and her group of fellow ageless fighters: Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli). When their secret is discovered by former CIA agent Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the group finds themselves on the run from being captured and tortured by pharmaceutical company CEO Merrick (Harry Melling), who wants to discover the secret of their immortality. To make matters more complicated, a new immortal has awakened, U.S. Marine Nile Freeman (KiKi Layne), who Andy must track down and induct into their group. With Nile resistant to the idea of her immortality and Merrick's forces closing in, it remains to be seen if Andy and her warriors will be able to escape a fate worse than death.

Related:  The 25 Best Films on Netflix Right Now

Rucka's story for The Old Guard  follows a fairly standard format for sci-fi/fantasy properties, where the audience follows a character new to the world as a way of introducing the rules. Further, Nile's arc to becoming a hero, where she's reluctant at first, and Andy's jaded mentor, are similarly familiar to those who are well acquainted with these kinds of stories. Still, the world Rucka has constructed in The Old Guard is a fascinating one, and he deftly pulls back the curtain slowly, so that viewers don't have to sit through too much exposition all at once. Rucka's script also effectively uses every bit of world-building to further develop the characters, and add some emotional texture to their lives as immortals. However, these quiet moments of exposition and character development tend to slow down the movie too much at times, dragging down the pace of the action film to a near-standstill. While this may work for some viewers, others will find themselves getting distracted.

It doesn't help that when The Old Guard has an action scene, the fight choreography and Prince-Bythewood's directing is so riveting, it's impossible to look away. Because Andy and her fellow fighters have been warriors for centuries, they're comfortable using all kinds of weapons, from modern guns to swords and battle axes, and The Old Guard puts that to good use. What's perhaps even more unique is the choreography of the group, which is done in such a way that Andy, Booker, Joe and Nicky fight as if they're four parts of a whole weapon. It's incredible to watch because action movies rarely feature such choreography, but it makes sense for their characters since they've been fighting together for centuries - it's only natural they'd be just as aware of each other as they are of their own limbs. This attention to detail in Prince-Bythewood's directing is what elevates The Old Guard's  fight scenes above and beyond many other action movies.

For their parts, the cast of The Old Guard also works incredibly well together to bring these compelling characters to life. Theron has proven her skill as an action star in the past, particularly in Mad Max: Fury Road , and she brings that same badass energy to Andy in The Old Guard . Layne, who plays Andy's new "recruit" Nile, is also a force to be reckoned with, holding her own alongside Theron and the rest of the cast. The two are the undeniable leads of The Old Guard , but Kenzari and Marinelli are standouts as Joe and Nicky. The two bring plenty of heart and comic relief to the movie, which is much needed to balance out the seriousness of Andy and Nile - though they have their light-hearted moments as well. Schoenaerts, as the other member of the group, also has his moments, though he's given less to work with; the same goes for Ejiofor and Melling. Altogether, The Old Guard's cast works seamlessly together to bring entertaining and emotional character dynamics to the screen.

Ultimately, The Old Guard offers plenty of exciting action and fun character beats to keep viewers hooked even when the story screeches to a halt. It's an excellent escape for fans of the comics, superhero movies and anything with slick action scenes. And with The Old Guard releasing on Netflix, audiences still staying at home and avoiding movie theaters can easily tune in to this perfect summer popcorn movie. Though the film may devote a little too much time to setting up a potential sequel, that can be said of almost every franchise starter these days - and there's sure to be many fans dying to see what happens next with this group of immortals. (Studios also should be knocking down Prince-Bythewood's door to direct more superhero/action movies after this.) In the end, anyone even vaguely interested in the premise or seeing Theron in another action movie would do well with checking out The Old Guard .

Next: The Old Guard Movie Trailer

The Old Guard  is now streaming on Netflix. It is 118 minutes long and rated R for sequences of graphic violence and language.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments section!

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The old guard.

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Old Guard’ on Netflix, in Which Charlize Theron Kicks Butt Forever, Almost Literally

Where to stream:.

• The Old Guard

(Siren emoji) POTENTIAL FRANCHISE ALERT (siren emoji): The Old Guard sure seems like Netflix’s next big thing, a superhero saga — based on a comic book you likely haven’t heard of — primed and ready for as much crossover success as its gruesome violence allows (which is a more-than-fair amount, he said cynically). Veteran director Gina Pryce-Bythewood jumps from Love and Basketball and The Secret Life of Bees to a visually dynamic genre, hopefully proving herself capable of bringing refreshing textures to a medium-to-large-ish-budget mainstream venture.

THE OLD GUARD : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The broadsword is the first clue this four-person hero squad isn’t your typical black-ops outfit. I mean, when you acquire a weapon that’ll last you for centuries, why wouldn’t you hold onto it? They are IMMORTAL and they are WARRIORS and they are more than a little TORTURED by it. They are the Old Guard, led by Andy (Charlize Theron), but I shall call her ANDROMACHE OF SCYTHIA, as that’s what’s on her birth certificate, although that document is likely long gone, perhaps lost or destroyed at or around the Battle of Hastings. She’s been around a while, is what I’m saying, longer even than her fellow quick-healing, nigh-eternal warriors: gay lovers for the ages Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli), and total newb Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), who’s only a couple centuries old.

So this gang of four lives and works underground, hiring itself out for good deeds, e.g., rescuing schoolchildren when they’re held hostage by a militia in Morocco. That’s what Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) enlists them for, but as that one guy in that one movie said, it’s a trap. They’re gunned down, and caught on camera being like totally immortal as heck, you know, magically shedding bullets, mending any compound fractures and gingerly picking themselves up off the ground — such things won’t kill them, but they can still feel painnnnnnnnnn.

Copley set ’em up to confirm his suspicions of supernaturalism, and intends to funnel them to pharmaceutical bigwig Merrick (Harry Melling), believing he’s wants to use immortals’ DNA and other bodily goops to develop drugs to combat humanity’s many ailments. But true to big-pharma form, Merrick is a sadistic capitalist shithead who only foresees profits atop profits, and perhaps Copley, and his giant crazy-guy superfan bulletin board full of clippings and string and pushpins documenting ANDROMACHE OF SCYTHIA’s many centuries of noble deeds, has some regrets.

So the Old Guard is in a bit of a pickle. Reinforcements will be recruited just in the nick: they all share a dream — that’s how they find other immortals, see — about Nile (Kiki Layne), a U.S. Marine who took a knife to the jugular while subduing a person of interest in Afghanistan, and improbably woke up soon after without even a phantom tickle. ANDROMACHE OF SCYTHIA snatches her up, and you’d think maybe explain things a bit, but no, our 1,000-year-old protag is gruff and cryptic. ANDROMACHE OF SCYTHIA takes a long, long pull on a bottle of Ouzo (I know, yuck, right?) and they get in a fight, possibly to see if Nile can handle herself. (Note: Nile can handle herself.)

The Old Guard now numbers five. The more impossible-to-kill people, the merrier, I always say, especially when you have a mad pharma-monger siccing his private army of faceless goons on you. This is officially a goddamn action-adventure now. There are rules to thee immortal existence for Nile to learn, of course. And will everything get complicated? When does everything ever not get complicated?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: In the realm of Charlize Theron action films, The Old Guard is better than Aeon Flux but not as good as Mad Max: Fury Road .

Performance Worth Watching: Layne was luminescent in If Beale Street Could Talk , and The Old Guard proves she’s capable of dramatically embiggening goofy genre fare like this.

Memorable Dialogue: Andy sums up Nile to the other immortals: “She stabbed me, so I think she has potential.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: I have so many questions. What if you cut off ANDROMACHE OF SCYTHIA’s head, and take it really far away? Will the head grow a new body, or will the body grow a new head, or will they both grow their missing portions and we end up with TWO ANDROMACHE OF SCYTHIAs? The immortals heal themselves physically muy rapidamente, but what about psychological trauma? Is that covered by immortality insurance? I would assume so, at least somewhat, considering the lifestyle brings with it the burden of centuries of pain and loss that’d send one of us 79-years-and-change-on-average types tumbling into crippling despair. Do they go to analysis? If so, what mortal, trustworthy doctor could handle the sheer mass of psycho-damage, and not violate HIPAA laws?

Maybe this stuff will be covered in a sequel (if so, can I have story credit?), since The Old Guard introduces enough wriggly and succulent storybait worms (two words: DEATH LOOP!) to suggest someone is hovering o’er a keyboard, waiting for this movie to ball-peen enough effing skulls to warrant the green light. And maybe this is the quarantine crazies talking, but the movie is fairly fresh superhero fodder, conceptually sturdy and poised to fill a void for those of us who haven’t seen an MCU movie for a whole entire year, which equals a thousand million years in MCU years.

• Stream It Or Skip It

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Broken Horses’ on Hulu, a Solid Journalistic Expose About Doping in Horse Racing

Stream it or skip it: ‘hack your health: the secrets of your gut’ on netflix, a documentary about actual poop, and the emerging science about it, stream it or skip it: ‘thank you, goodnight: the bon jovi story’ on hulu, a docuseries checking in on the new jersey rockers as they celebrate 40 years as a band, stream it or skip it: 'the asunta case' on netflix, a true crime thriller about two parents accused of killing their 12-year-old daughter.

Prince-Bythewood manages to deliver the goods consistently despite some silliness and rampant setting-it-all-upness. It’s fairly standard stuff of this ilk, a little bit better than most thanks to Layne and Theron’s charisma and some pretty cracking action sequences, which are good, but not Atomic Blonde good. There’s a whole lotta plot, the pop-music soundtrack is watery and listless in this context and it’s occasionally too gory for young audiences to watch when their parents are in the room. But Theron adds a nifty double-curved-blade ax to her action-film arsenal, it earns its deep-ish emo beats and it sometimes actually feels like it adequately conveys the consequences of death. It also leaves you feeling like a sequel would be better, deeper, richer. Gotcha.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Old Guard isn’t great, but it is pretty good, and has the potential to get better. There’s no reason for this not to be a big fat hit.

Should you stream or skip #TheOldGuard on @netflix ? #SIOSI — Decider (@decider) July 11, 2020

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba .

Stream The Old Guard on Netflix

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Long Live Charlize Theron

In ‘The Old Guard’, she kicks ass with her immortal crew

“I used to be worshipped as a god,” says Charlize Theron’s character, Andy, in Netflix’s The Old Guard. The action-movie-going population definitely worships Theron herself, primarily for her Furiosa of Mad Max: Fury Road and laconic Cold War spy in Atomic Blonde. She’s our most nuanced ass-kicker, dispatching deadly violence with a deep sigh of exhaustion, as if deflated that she’s still entertaining audiences by mowing down scores of nameless men on camera. I still think back to the first time I saw her in 1996’s godawful 2 Days in the Valley, playing a hapless blonde with minimal lines and clothing, and thinking even then, dude, you’re obviously too good for this.

THE OLD GUARD ★★★★  (4/5 stars) Directed by: Gina Prince-Bythewood Written by: Greg Rucka Starring: Charlize Theron, KiKi Layne, Matthias, Schoenaerts Running time: 125 min

Here, she’s Andromache of Sythia, an immortal warrior who’s been fighting various Big Bads throughout the ages alongside four male, similarly unkillable cohorts, who Greg Rucka first drew in a comic of the same name .

The villain du jour is a British pharma-bro named Merrick, a cinematic mashup of Martin Shkreli and Mark Zuckerberg. He’s a hoodie-wearing twerp who Harry Melling plays to perfection.  If Melling looks familiar, it’s because he was Harry Potter’s obnoxious cousin Dudley Dursley. Merrick is–wait for it–obsessed with finding the secret to eternal life. If he can bring in Andy and her crew, with the aid of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s former CIA operative Copley, he can harness their DNA.

Meanwhile, the foursome has also discovered the emergence of a new immortal, a female Marine named Nile (KiKi Layne), who’s getting a lot of side-eye from her Afghanistan-based colleagues after surviving a gaping neck wound during a botched raid.

Does it all feel pretty familiar, as ultra-violent comics adaptations go? Sure. But under the direction of Gina Price-Bythewood (Love and Basketball), The Old Guard spends as much time developing the relationships between its principals as it does on the bloodshed. And it’s a real credit to Rucka’s screenplay that the two characters you come away wanting to know more about are supporting players: Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli), two of Andy’s guard who’ve become a couple over the millennia. They met during the Crusades and have killed each other many times. Ah, romance. A scene in which a dumbass soldier cracks, “What is he, your boyfriend?” to one of them elicits my favorite speech in the film, an ode to love and devotion that leaves a truckful of hired guns looking anywhere but at their two captives.

Of course Theron holds her own. Various flashbacks give us a little insight into her past, including a long stint of mobs executing her as a witch, over and over again. No wonder she looks so fucking tired. Matthias Schoenaerts, as the other member of the team, is a Napoleon-era soldier named Booker who’s been her right-hand man ever since, and it’s nice to see him in popcorny fare like this; usually you’ll find him in somber indies or period pieces. Rucka provides him a good speech about the bummer of immortality, about losing your family and anyone you ever love. It’s like a vampire movie with less camp.

If you’re here for the action, though, there’s plenty of it. Theron is so good at martial arts now that her fight scenes are a thing of beauty – I briefly harbored a fantasy of her being the next John Wick baddie, and people keep whispering about an Atomic Blonde crossover . But Nile has a problem with all the killing: “I saw what you did… all those bodies,” she points out after one giant set piece involving SWAT teams and assault rifles and explosions and lots of head shots. I began to hope there would be a larger arc moving away from gratuitous gun violence, but not so much. The young Nile has lessons to learn, including the fact that an endless supply of nameless characters will always line up for her to take them out with splashy fake-blood squibs.

On one hand, I get it: What’s a comic-book action movie if not a chance to revel in some harmless offing of people who want to do bad stuff? But for a movie so concerned with the idea of mortality–and lack thereof–The Old Guard is strangely cavalier about human life.

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Sara Stewart is a film critic and a culture and entertainment writer whose work is featured in the New York Post, CNN.com, and more. A Rotten Tomatoes certified reviewer for both film and television, Sara's work can be fully appreciated at sarastewart.org. But not on Twitter, because she’s been troll-free since 2018.

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All you need to know about The Old Guard 2 on Netflix

The Old Guard 2 still doesn't have a release date and wasn't included in Netflix's 2024 slate announcement in February 2024 .

Don't panic yet though as Netflix did announce that further movies are to be announced for this year, so hopefully the action sequel is one of them. After all, it did finish filming way back in September 2022.

"We shot it approximately a year and a half ago, and I think they're hitting the last stage of post-production," star Matthias Schoenaerts said in February 2024.

"As far as I've understood, I think there's been a switch at Netflix high up. I think there's a different CEO, so that leads to a reconsidering of release, and how and when, and that's not up to me. But I know we're hitting the last stage of post-production, so it's gonna show up at some point."

Recently, Netflix scrapped Halle Berry's sci-fi movie The Mothership because of post-production delays, so fans are worried The Old Guard 2 might suffer the same fate. Let's not lose faith yet though since the first movie was a hit.

As we wait for any news, here's everything you need to know about The Old Guard 2.

The Old Guard 2 potential release date: When can we expect The Old Guard 2?

As mentioned above, The Old Guard 2 doesn't have a confirmed release date on Netflix as of April 2024.

The first movie proved a hit on Netflix when it was released in July 2020, so we thought The Old Guard 2 would be released in July 2023. However, that never came to pass.

What we do know is that the sequel was filmed from June to September 2022 in the likes of Italy and the UK, so barring any reshoots, it's almost ready to go. It was missing from Netflix's confirmed 2024 release slate, though.

Fortunately, it sounds like The Old Guard 2 will be worth the wait – and we might even be getting a third movie after the sequel arrives.

"There's an ending that kind of demands a number three, which makes me very happy," producer Marc Evans told Variety in May 2023, although he stopped short of confirming it was actually happening.

Behind the scenes, Victoria Mahoney took over as director from Gina Prince-Bythewood, who stayed on as a producer. In front of the camera, though, the main cast all came back for another action-packed adventure.

Greg Rucka – who wrote the comic book the movie was based on – returned to write the sequel. He always envisioned the story as a trilogy , which might be why Evans was so confident about a third movie.

The Old Guard 2 cast: Who's coming back for The Old Guard 2?

There was only one major casualty in the first movie, as Harry Melling's Merrick painfully worked out what happened when you mess with Andy's team.

All of the main cast will return for the sequel, so that's Charlize Theron as Andy, KiKi Layne as Nile, Matthias Schoenaerts as Booker, Marwan Kenzari as Joe and Luca Marinelli as Nicky.

Chiwetel Ejiofor 's Copley has now seen the error of his ways and, at the end of the first movie, is tasked with ensuring the team remain hidden from anyone who would do them harm (like Merrick).

Ejiofor has been confirmed to return, too, but it's unclear if he'll have a major role in the sequel or will just be an M-like figure on the outside.

Instead, it seems that Veronica Ngo will play a key part in the sequel as the returning Quynh, but it's not yet clear whether that will be as a friend or foe to the team.

In the comics, Quynh's character is named Noriko and is Japanese. The decision to change it came after Veronica Ngo was cast, and it doesn't mean that another character called Noriko will arrive in the sequel.

"When Veronica was cast, she said, 'I'm not Japanese – I'm Vietnamese'. [Director Gina Prince-Bythewood] reached out to me and said, 'Can we accommodate that?' and I was like, 'absolutely'," Greg Rucka confirmed.

"Noriko becomes Quynh – Quynh is now Vietnamese. It really was as simple as wanting to honour that and be respectful of that."

It's also possible that we could see more of Micheal Ward as fallen Old Guard member Lykon.

We saw him die in flashbacks to Andy and Quynh's time together, but could there be more to his story? He's the only immortal we've heard of to die, so it could be something explored as we get more of Andy and Quynh's relationship.

Two new faces have been confirmed for the sequel in the form of Uma Thurman and Henry Golding . We don't yet know who they'll be playing and whether, like Quynh, they'll be friend or foe to Andy and her team.

The Old Guard ending: How does it set up The Old Guard 2?

As we've spoken about in more detail here , the most significant bit of the ending comes in the credits scene.

We catch up with Booker in Paris six months after he's been banished from the team due to his betrayal. As he walks into his place, he's greeted by none other than Quynh, who has somehow escaped from the bottom of the ocean.

"It's nice to finally meet you," she tells him, but that's all we get from Quynh's return, so we'll have to wait until the sequel to see if she's out for vengeance or whether she just wants to be reunited with Andy.

Rucka has already written a second Old Guard comic book called Force Multiplied that also starts with Quynh's return.

To give a tease of what to expect, the comic book sequel sees Quynh reveal that she thinks they've been made immortal to make humanity suffer, rather than to save it, and she wants Andy to join her in her quest, and as her lover again .

But if you want all of the answers and what happens next, you can read the comic as you wait for the potential sequel.

The other major reveal that will have an impact on the sequel is that Andy is now technically no longer immortal.

She realises this when a stab wound from an earlier fight in church doesn't heal, so now, every battle could technically be her last. Andy believes that the arrival of Nile has led to this massive change.

"I think you showed up when I lost my immortality. So I could see what it was like. So I could remember. Remember what it… what it was like to feel unbreakable. Remarkable. You reminded me there are people still worth fighting for," she explained.

It's one of the biggest changes from the comic book it's based on, but it's a vital one , as it adds a tension that could have been missing from a movie about immortal soldiers.

That's about all we know so far about the story of the sequel, but we can also expect that Theron's Andy will be sporting a striking new hairstyle . "We needed something that felt like time had passed, so for that, you go with the ol' mullet," Theron explained.

The Old Guard 2 trailer: Any footage from The Old Guard 2 yet?

Filming might have finished on The Old Guard 2 , but unfortunately, it'll probably be a while before we see any footage, as there's still no release date.

The Old Guard is available to watch on Netflix. The Old Guard 2 does not yet have a release date.