Charlize Theron and Kiki Layne kick off a more thoughtful kind of action franchise with The Old Guard
Film Reviews Movie Review
“So are you good guys or bad guys?”
“Depends on the century—we fight for what’s right.”
With The Old Guard, Love & Basketball and Beyond The Lights director Gina Prince-Bythewood helms an action-fantasy hybrid that takes the beauty marks—and warts—of each genre and creates a sequel-starter for Netflix. The film follows an idealistic cadre of heroes who all share a common thread: They can live for centuries. The titular group is led by Andy (Charlize Theron), with Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), Joe (Marwan Kenzari), and Nicky (Luca Marinelli) making up the rest of the crew. When a new immortal warrior, Nile (Kiki Layne), joins them, she sparks a reckoning with the Guard’s ideals—and the rosy picture they try to uphold.
Early in the film, Andy gifts Booker with a copy of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which makes sense: A novel whose central ethic is individual goodness amid an errant society fits right in among this league of extraordinary Samaritans. The Guard has been around for ages, fighting (and dying) for humankind. At some point, they each found others like them, and banded together to secretly rescue humanity from itself ad nauseam. From stopping nuclear bombs to rescuing child hostages, Andy and company are guardians of the same mortals who would detest them if their powers were found out. The rub is that there’s a cap on their so-called immortality—one day, wounds just stop healing. It’s at this point that this superhero movie becomes a changing-of-the-guard Western, ruminating on what we leave to the next generation and what ideals it prioritizes.
Greg Rucka pens the screenplay, refashioning his own graphic novel and doing as much to retain tone and character agency as Gillian Flynn did for her Gone Girl adaptation, for example. So many action-fantasy films rely on flashy visuals and a basic “good vs. evil” plot to move the story along, but Prince-Bythewood takes a cue from Rucka’s source material. She’s unafraid to sit and breathe with the players on the stage. Peaks and valleys in the film’s momentum enable a focus on character. In one such valley, Nile feels eyes on her as a result of her miraculous recovery from having her throat slashed. Feeling the pressure of judgment, the Marine isolates herself (as much as one can in a combat zone) and turns on her iPod, letting Frank Ocean’s “Godspeed” take her away. In another, a captured immortal goes on a high-intensity monologue about their lover, a storytelling luxury not often afforded to masculine characters.
Such access to the characters’ inner world makes them infinitely more tangible, showing a sense of care on Prince-Bythewood’s part. Layne and Theron both get roles that deserve their caliber: Theron’s stiff upper-lip turns in Mad Max: Fury Road and Atomic Blonde, as well as Layne’s soulful performance in If Beale Street Could Talk, find extensions in the shoes they fill here. On the opposite end, mega-baddie Merrick (Harry Melling) puts Lex Luthor’s ego into a Silicon Valley douchebag body, abducting the Guard and tapping into their bloodstreams for DNA—ostensibly to be harvested for the common good. Meanwhile, Chiwetel Ejiofor continues to provide subtle surprises as naïve enabler Copley, whose cooperation with the villain is a tell-tale heart that haunts him more with every beat. The focus on compelling character arcs makes for an indulgent runtime that threatens to slow down the pacing too much, but The Old Guard blossoms in its third act thanks to the emotional investment.
Prince-Bythewood’s athletic background (she considers Love & Basketball a memoir of sorts) serves the film well—the fight scenes are choreographed methodically and practically, without stiletto heels and tight spandex. In fact, the movements are so intricate and deliberate that a simple second of imbalance speaks volumes, a testimonial to both Prince-Bythewood’s confidence as a director and the skill of fight coordinator Danny Hernandez. With spent shells firing and roundhouse kicks landing, the action sequences are a solid mix of sustained shots of the actors and sharp cuts, establishing a vicious rhythm that doesn’t lose steam in its more combative moments.
In a past life, this would be a standard B-movie shoot-’em-up. But, as Prince-Bythewood presents it, The Old Guard is an effective and tender bundle of contradictions, a franchise launchpad about (among other things) endings. Near the climax, Andy sighs with the weight of a thousand unnecessary deaths, “We don’t get a say in when it ends. We never have. But we can control how we live.” Hope may be a tall order in the current Boschian mayhem we’re living in, but it’s not so impractical to keep your head down and try to do the right thing through it all. The immortals, too, hope for the best while preparing for the worst. If that’s quixotic, then point the way toward the nearest windmill.
73 Comments
“We can’t let them militarize the powers we’re already militarizing!”
I’ve never really read Rucka’s comics, but his Atticus Kodiak novels started out as decent genre efforts then went completely off the rails. But, I think his style might work on a comics page. Well, off to DC Universe to check out a couple runs.
Rucka has done a lot of great comics work but you’re definitely better checking out his indie stuff like Whiteout, Queen and Country, Stumptown etc. His superhero stuff isn’t nearly as good, IMHO, except for Gotham Central which is superb.
Counterpoint, the bits he contributed to ‘52′ are some of the best superhero comics of the last twenty years.
I read that when it came out but don’t remember a lot about it. His bits were the Question sections? I do remember them being a lot of fun.
Yeah, it has a couple of favorite sequences. I love Vic hanging out in the Lesbian bar, but it’s his death that stands out. It’s the only superhero death that’s ever made me emotional. It’s not epic or noble, it’s a guy dying of lung cancer, and choking out his last to his protegee.
What were those? (Did he do the Renee Montoya bits?)
Yep, he did the Montoya parts.
A lot of his superhero work suffers from weak endings with unresolved threads, usually as a result of being cut short by events out of his control, but I think most of it remains great.I wasn’t overly enamoured with his Superman stuff, but would recommend basically everything he did with Batman, Wonder Woman*, Checkmate, Batwoman, and The Question. His Punisher run was excellent too.*His first Wonder Woman run anyway. The “Rebirth” version was very high quality (the level of care taken over every aspect of it is impressive), but for my liking it was far too interested in undoing Azzarello’s outstanding “New 52” run rather than telling its own story.
i probably came across as dismissive of his superhero stuff, which I’m not. He’s very talented and the superhero stuff of his I’ve read is very good. I think though, that he’s a writer who really shines in street level stories. There’s a bunch of really good comics writers who love crime stories that I feel are much better the more grounded the stories are. Rucka, Brubaker, Azzarello, Spencer and Bendis come to mind. The more down to earth characters like Spider-man, Daredevil, Punisher etc suit their strengths way more than JLA, Avengers, epic stuff.Either way he’s a fairly safe pair of hands and the original poster is likely to enjoy the vast majority of the stuff with his name on the cover.
I see a big connection between his Wonder Woman and Andromache.
Wiuld LOVE to see Queen and Country adapted
Queen and Country is amazing (even if it is a Sandbaggers pastiche/rip-off). Started off as comics and he wrote a couple of novels as well.Lazarus is also great.
Lazarus rules. The introduction of the Zmey (and his subsequent backstory) is just phenomenal storytelling.
Lazarus is so, so good. I think in a fair world, it would be as popular and well known as Saga.
In fairness…Saga has taken the last two years off, and it’s still nearly doubled Lazarus’s issue count.Lazarus is a better book, but Rucka hasn’t shipped his non-DC stuff consistently in years.
True, true. That said, and this isn’t a counterpoint to your point at all, it’s weird how much momentum Saga will have lost when it comes back…if it comes back.
I mean…I NEED to know what happens next!The last issue literally ripped my heart out, haha
I don’t want to be that guy, but ‘literally’?
There was literal heart ripping!
Then I humbly take it back. I should have known. I had a similar thing happen when after reading an issue of Cable, Rob Liefeld literally kicked me in the balls.
Stan: “Lazarus” is the fucking BEST. 🙂
Can you blame him? I think we all were sad when THE SANDBAGGERS ended, b/c showrunner Ian Mackintosh had…A Tragic Single-Engine Airplane Accident I Am Certain the UK’s Security Services and the CIA Had Nothing Whatsoever To Do With….
I only read the first Kodiak and while it was interesting to see Rucka jump with both feet into the uncompromising topic of abortion, it’s probably the worst of his works I’ve read. As others are saying, the comics are much better. Queen & Country is fantastic and if you pick up Gotham Central that will start you down the Ed Brubaker path as well.
There’s one place to start with Rucka’s comics catalogue: “Gotham Central.” He and Ed Brubaker wrote 40 issues of the daily lives of police detectives trying to solve crimes in a city full of supervillains (and also Batman.) It’s also just a great middle ground between Rucka’s superhero books and his more grounded ficition, although he’s typically great at both genres amd everything in between. I especially liked “Black Magick,” though it’s been on hiatus for a few years now.
Is Schoenaerts good? I remember thinking he was good in Far From the Madding Crowd but I think this is the first I’ve seen of him since then.
I’ve never seen Schoenaerts give a bad performance even when the movie around him — like Red Sparrow— is middling. I’m surprised to see him in an action genre piece. He looks ideal for those kinds of parts but seems to have focused his career on more serious dramatic films by choice. Bullhead and Rust and Bone are pretty good films and I’ve heard positive things about Mustang too.
I hated The Danish Girl, but thought he was really good.
Bullhead is phenomenal.
He’s great in Mustang too but it’s the role he seems to love or gets typecast in: physical, brooding, silent, intense, …
Highly recommend the comic. I don’t know that it needs an adaptation, but it is one of my favorite graphic novels of the last few years and a really thoughtful piece on age and violence.
I remember liking it well enough, Rucka knows how to write a good comic, but feeling like it was mostly surface-level pleasure. I feel like Bendis/Oeming’s Powers got there first and did it better, although they admittedly had a lot more space to work win.
Having read Powers as well, I disagree. The Old Guard is suffused with a melancholy you can miss if you buzz through it. My favorite bit is the flashback to how Booker ended things with his family. It’s not really an action story so much as a meditation on what it’s worth to live forever. Power, by comparison, has Bendis tendency to make all his character over-chatty get in the way of some of its better storytelling potential.
Counterpoint — does The Old Guard have an entire issue devoted to grunting, fornicating murder apes? ADVANTAGE: POWERSI should give it another read, though (and the good stuff in Powers does have to contend with the chatting, maybe there should’ve been more apes).
In all seriousness, the ape sex issue was one of the very best in that book, but I felt like despite it running for a long time (like 12 volumes?) it never went anywhere, it just all kind of meandered.
Really glad it’s good! Love these books.
I love adaptations of comics I’ve never heard of before. There’s only so many times you can do Batman/Superman/etc and just get tired of it (which is why I do still love the Nolan Batman trilogy, and essentially despise the recent takes on Superman…plus, well, Superman isn’t supposed to be -dark-). I really wish it was 14 hours later now, because I really want to watch this.
didnt know this was directed by Prince-Bythewood, this went from a we will see to im def watching this friday.
Fine, fine, fine. Make me spend a few hours looking at Charlize Theron, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Matthias Schoenaerts. Twist my arm…
Yes, but can you get them all to commit to a foursome with you…?
Wow — Chiwetel Ejiofor really seems to like playing these idealistic villain with a conscience types, doesn’t he…? This guy sounds just like The Operative in Whedon’s Serenity….
He’s very similar to that, if you replace ‘noble commitment to flawed ideology’ with ‘dead wife’.
Except, spoilers…..He does end up having a “noble commitment”, it’s just as a history superfan rather than an ideologue.
It can be both, Rueful Countenance.
BTW, watched The Old Guard w/my wife last night, and…enjoyed it quite a bit.
Further to this — was listening to the FIGHTING IN THE WAR ROOM podcast this week, and David Ehrlich went on a three-day screed (well, it felt that long!) against The Old Guard, interrupting his co-hosts as is his constant habit to shove his own opinions down everybody’s throats.
I dunno — maybe he’s not as big an NeoLiberal asshole in print as he is on this podcast, but in order to find out I’d have to first find something he’d actually written on Indywire, which he alleges to write for….
Ms. Theron has proven she can do action, comedy and drama well and be beautiful in all of them, but willing to dirty that beauty up if the role requires it. I think it’s time to start talking about her as an all-time great.
100%. She is one of the true masters of the acting craft. Not only that, she has really great taste in projects. Half of the reason I like any actor over another is because of the projects they choose. She almost always chooses things that are interesting.
I’d love to see her in a few more straight up dramas. A period piece maybe?
I was just saying to someone that Theron is like an oscar-winning Mila Jovovich; badass with a plethora of action roles that never get talked about when talking about the all-time greats, which are usually characters instead of actresses (e.g. Ripley and Sarah Connor, not Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton), but with Theron there’s at least four off the top of my head that are good or great with her firmly in the lead action role
The performances really carried the film to being as enjoyable as it was as man that script was clumsy as hell. Still quite fun although I found myself pondering if getting Theron involved ended up hurting it a little bit as it felt like this one should have been a miniseries or something. Actually felt like it had been written as such as there was so much that was crammed together in the film.Having written that, the most headshaking moment to me in the whole film was that they had a French character whose name was Booker.
“Bouquer” is an (outdated) French verb meaning “(of a dog used in hunting) to bring out of the burrow” and an (obsolete) French verb meaning “give in to force” which I would ordinarily say is a bit of a stretch but this is a film where:
1. The main badass lady who fights men is literally named “Fighter of Men” in Greek (Andromache)
2. Newly dead USMC-regulation-conforming-cornrows-sorry-”multiple-braid-hairstyle” rookie immortal listens to “Godspeed” on her iDevice while coming to the realisation she is dead.
3. Crazy bad guy quotes King Lear.
4. As indicated in the review, Andromache gives Man Number Two a “first edition” copy of Don Quixote (but she totally got conned, that book is a mass-produced leather-bound thing with machined gold edging, not one of the 400 “first editions” most of which were lost in a fucking shipwreck and the surviving 70 copies are basically the literary equivalent of holy fucking relics, and also someone who is really into Cervantes calls is “Quixote” not “Don Quixote” but that’s probably picking to nittily and just makes me aware that what I’m really angry about with this movie is how obvious it was they decided “fuck doing even the tiniest bit of research”) because even though their “quest” in no way resembles or invokes a single thing about Cervantes and implies nobody on the project read the fucking book, it is at least consistent with the way that the bad guy’s use of King Lear implies nobody on the project read King Lear either.
5. That rookie immortal’s name is NILE FREEMAN, a Black woman named NILE (cradle of civilization or at least one of them) FREEMAN (because absolutely stunningly beautiful Black women are free to be in the USMC and get killed in the first reel and become the unwilling slightly-side-eye-is-she-no-surely-not-not-in-this-day-and-age-but-oh-God-yes-she-is-a-little-bit-sassy captive-colleague of a WHITE SOUTH AFRICAN MOTHER/SISTER/SCHOOLMISTRESS-FIGURE who she has to literally DIE FOR AT LEAST TWICE WHAT THE FUCK AAAAAAGH…)
6. Etc.
Picked up the comic. Booker’s French surname is actually LeLivre. Or “the book” in French.Fuck this thing, right in l’orielle.
I thought the character’s last name was “le Livre”, which is “book” in French, hence, “Booker”.
Also, “bouquer” is French argot for “tired”.
I wish kinja had a spoiler hiding feature because I have a question.
This movie was trash. Utter garbage. Just fast forwarded to the for the obvious last scene. I am not familiar w/the comic so i cannot make any comment about that but as a sit around and watch a dumb but entertaining movie this was a total failure. My lincoln logs that i had as a kid has were less wooden than the acting in this. Again, total garbaggio.
In a past life, this would be a standard B-movie shoot-’em-up. But, as Prince-Bythewood presents it, The Old Guard is an effective and tender bundle of contradictions, a franchise launchpad about (among other things) endings.Translation: it is a mere solid B-movie with a less than average script, but since both the leading actors and the director are women, we elevate it to whatever “effective and tender bundle of contradictions” is supposed to mean.
Oh, btw, how can Theron’s character still lead a group of immortals, since she is no longer one of them?
Meh, pretty predictable, though entertaining overall. Found the flashbacks more interesting ala Highlander than the actual plot. Willing to watch more.
This was exceptionally, disappointingly boring. It wasn’t incompetently terrible the way that 6 Underground was, but it really could have used a bit of that show’s dumb enthusiasm.
I didn’t find The Old Guard that way — but boy, was Six Underground dumb!!!It’s what a talentless person would think Deadpool is all about….
6 Underground was completely terrible. But the one thing I can give it is that it clearly let the audience know what makes a 6 Underground movie.6 Underground and Old Guard are both obviously trying to launch franchises, but I really don’t know what Old Guard II would be? Do they fight terrorists, or overthrow governments, or are they always just on the run? Are they Mission Impossible, Fast & Furious, the A-Team, or What We Do in Shadows?This is maybe the one chance to tell us a story about these folks, and I just thought it was a pretty meh story to pick. The first movie should be them kickin’ butt, and then leave the navel-gazing and betrayals for a sequel.(this actually sortof reminded me of the back-half of Hancock. Overall Hancock is probably an underrated movie, but at the end it gets bogged down in all its mopey-immortal mythology. And this was an entire movie of mopey-immortal mythology.)
I don’t think it’s that hard — Charlize Theron laid it out to Chiwetel Ejiofor in the final scene before the setup for the sequel: His character is going to keep them off the radar, find them jobs where they won’t end up facing obsessively curious people just like him, and more effectively change matters for the better. So they’ll keep on doing what they did before, only with a bit more focus — before they run into more powerful opposition like Quynh who either wants vengeance…or if she just wants to rejoin the team, her having died horribly countless times before is going to make her a threat to the team.
I imagine the next movie will deal with Quynh, what she wants, and if Andy can give it to her without risking everybody else’s lives. Andy being mortal again might also push her towards looking into medicine and charitable organizations as a way to change matters for the better, which wouldn’t have occurred to her before because she’s always been immortal before. She spent Millennia as a Hammer thinking every problem was a nail — now she can no longer hammer like she used to, is there another way to use the knowledge gained from her longevity to accomplish the same goals…?I think I know why she was reluctant to use charitable organizations in the past — most of the traditional ones tended to become corrupt the longer they lasted, and even if they weren’t corrupt the sheer amount of money and influence they gathered about them made them targets for every greedy King, Prince, or Fearless Leader who saw them! But maybe, with modern technology, she can spread the wealth in ways that won’t trigger any unwelcome notice….
From this movie, do you think these characters are actually good at what they do? (whatever that might be) I really can’t think of an action franchise that decided to start out by making the characters so incredibly passive, while also seemingly mostly incompetent. In every wolverine story there’s the part where he gets shot 1,000 times, but then he gets up and kicks butt. This movie did that a bunch, except that instead of kicking butt our characters mostly got captured, or tortured, or captured and then tortured and then shot again.
Or with something like Bourne the character is totally passive/reactive, but at the end of the first movie you think “Huh, he’s pretty good at this.”
At the end of this movie I thought that Charlize and her hangers-on would have trouble safely crossing the street.
Is your real name “David Ehrlich”, and do you write for Indywire and co-host the FIGHTING IN THE WAR ROOM Podcast? Because Ehrlich went on a screed which must have bent the laws of Space and Time it went on so long against The Old Guard, interrupting his co-hosts so he could blather on endlessly.
Just checking.
I liked it. Charlize has great taste in films. Good fight scenes, a little funny here and there and I found my future husband, Luca Marinelli!!
Yeah, this is a textbook C/C- film. Very talented actors stuck in poor script/cheap production design/lifeless direction Hell. It’s felt like a YA film that’s too gory for kids and too boring/rote for adult action film fans.
I know I’m greyed here and no one will see this, but this movie was fantastic and i’m hoping it’s just the beginning of a fantastic trilogy, an action answer to To All The Boys. The action was great, the dialogue was moving, and the performances were elevated by everyone’s chemistry.
Look I enjoyed the movie BUT..I don’t get all the praise for the action. It was uninspired and not really interesting at all. After stuff like John Wick, Extraction and all the great stuff coming out of Asia how this action can be called anything beyond merely passable is beyond me.And for all that immortality – very little of it also played in the action sequences except in the least imaginative way possible – They’re dead oh wait they aren’t.
I’m not saying capitalism is solution to everything but it’s weird to think that someone who’s been around for over 5000 years still thinks shooting people in the head is the only way to fix world problems and not, say, amassing a fortune devoted to helping the starving masses. “That woman has forgotten more ways to kill than entire armies will ever learn.” Too bad Andy didn’t decide to go into medicine since more people die of disease than gun-crazy goons. If time is the one thing you don’t have to worry about why live like hobos when the compound interest you get from bank accounts could at least afford you a safe house with an alarm system that works?
Yeah, I just posted something similar — how are they not crazy rich…?
I figured that they are crazy rich, but knowing what straights will do to them if they find out means they live live vagabonds and only access their money when they want to get something like a first edition of Don Quixote or commission Rodin to do a sculpture (which turned out to be unnecessary as Andy ended up shagging him anyway!). As for setting up a medical practice? I’m not sure that’s something that would spring to mind for someone who’s been a warrior all her life, and her life lasts for thousands of years. (She doesn’t even know how to bandage herself without help.) Although… If this is successful enough to become a movie series, having a now-vulnerable Andy put her thousands of years of experience into medicine might be a direction for her character — especially if she’s still immortal, provided she doesn’t get killed, because suddenly learning how to heal is important to her!
Setting up charities is — problematic, especially if you have to periodically vanish so people don’t ask why you still look the same way you did fifty years ago. For every charity that’s successful, there are a thousand that are riddled with graft, corruption, and horrible management. Current charities also have to report where they get their money to tax authorities, which opens a can of worms a group of immortal soldiers don’t want opened — and back before centralized tax collection agencies, just about every king whose eyes were bigger than his treasury could find a corruptible Bishop or Cardinal or Pope willing to declare that secretive outfit “heretics”! (Happened to Templars, Jews, Muslims, Protestants — in the last three cases, repeatedly and even currently in some places, like India — damn Modi to whatever Hinduism considers Hell!)In the end, though, the reason’s simple — it’s a smart comic book adventure, and going into places like you suggested would violate the whole premise of comic books.
I wondered about that too. How sad to be doomed to just killing people for centuries.
Saw it the day it came out, and I did like it quite a bit, however:1) It was entirely predictable; not in a bad way, but I like surprises in a genre film. Even the epilogue. 2) They didn’t really explore the full potential (or even half of it) of the concept realistically — barely touching on only the most basic level and ideas. For example, how were all gournof them not ABSURDLY RICH? Why were they living and operating like vagabonds, instead of from absurdly well-furnished bases all over the world? Someone who lives for hundreds of years can get rich purely on interest alone, with nearly zero effort. This is before one considers the sale of gold dubloons, antiquities, etc. They also didn’t touch on how knowledgeable one would become after living that long. Theron’s character was a decent fighter, but they showed the advantage their vast experience would give them in almost no other way. And so on, and so on. 3) The acting was all pretty good, but the character motivations as written were all over the place.
I watched this over the weekend, and wow, I’m surprised at the positive review/solid B rating here. This just had a very generic, extended TV series pilot feel to it. Charlize be slummin’ it.
Maybe it’s watching endless British TV for 30-odd years but I just found the whole load of the film from “France” to my mate’s old local on the Thames distractingly cheap. Empty sets with cling-filmed boxes, weird cheap “Railway Station” road signs stuck up because someone said they were going to get a train, empty central London in the middle of the day… it felt more like an expensive BBC pilot if anything.