Back in the pandemic-corrupted summer of 2020, with theaters closed and franchise tentpoles fleeing the release calendar, the Netflix-produced superhero movie The Old Guard wound up with the field all to itself. Luckily, it also happened to be wonderful. Based on a cult comic by Greg Rucka and directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, the film followed a group of mercenaries who had the gift of immortality — they could be stabbed and amputated and maimed and mangled and burnt while fighting and still miraculously come back. The action was great, but what made The Old Guard so special was the way Prince-Bythewood, previously known for romantic dramas like Love & Basketball and Beyond the Lights (she would follow up The Old Guard with The Woman King, another stunt-filled action epic), concentrated on the spaces in between, lingering on the atmospheric and emotional details of life among people who’ve been around for centuries, sometimes millennia. The Old Guard had plenty of inventive and elegant fight sequences, but it was also yearning, patient, tormented, moody — it had personality and verve. It wasn’t just a serviceable replacement for the temporarily absent superhero blockbuster; it lit a potential new path forward.
Now, five years later, comes The Old Guard 2, directed by Victoria Mahoney, which was greenlit not long after the first film but has taken some time to reach screens, the victim of assorted delays. (Production reportedly wrapped in 2022.) As a result, those who don’t remember what happened in The Old Guard or never bothered to watch it in the first place might find themselves struggling to catch up, as this sequel really does pick up where the first movie left off. It opens with the salvage of the iron maiden containing Quynh (Veronica Ngo), which had been dumped into the sea many centuries ago. She of course (of course!) was the onetime soulmate and sister-in-arms of Andromache a.k.a. Andy (Charlize Theron), the ostensible leader of our merry band of immortals. Quynh’s return was teased at the end of the first film, in which her story lent some haunting shading to Andy, who was tortured with guilt for not being able to find her. Remember, these people can’t die, but they do feel things and they do experience pain, so Quynh was down at the bottom of the sea, drowning and coming back to life and then drowning again, over and over, hundreds of times a day for hundreds of years. The suggestion was that she had lost her mind in unthinkable ways down there.
When she shows up in The Old Guard 2, Quynh is understandably pissed that no one came to rescue her from this watery, near-eternal non-death — though in Andy’s defense, she did spend several hundred years looking for her. It does come as a bit of a disappointment, however, that Quynh has not reached some heretofore-undiscovered level of psychosis. No, she’s just super-angry. That sounds like a quibble, but it’s sort of the problem with The Old Guard 2, which is a movie of half-measures and unexplored, surface-thin character elements.
To its credit, this follow-up doesn’t entirely betray the spirit of the original. It still tries to keep the focus on these people and their bizarre relationships. As you might remember (do you?), by the end of the earlier outing, Andy discovered that her powers had worn off and that she could now be permanently wounded or killed. Additionally, her old comrade Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), the former Napoleonic army officer still trying to reckon with the spiritual toll of immortality, had betrayed the team and been cast off. Adding to the interpersonal complications, now the romantic duo of Yusuf (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicolo (Luca Marinelli), whose centuries-long affair was a surprising highlight of the previous film (they had killed each other in battle before becoming lovers), are contemplating spending some time apart from each other.
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Into this volatile mix enters a previously unknown immortal, Discord (Uma Thurman), with sinister designs on our heroes and a small army at her command. So together with the return of the vengeful Quynh, The Old Guard 2 begins somewhat promisingly (there’s also an early action sequence that features some fun car-and-motorcycle stunts), but intent and execution are two different things, and the new film struggles to keep these balls in the air. Honestly, it barely tries. Don’t get too excited by the words “Uma Thurman,” because this movie doesn’t give her all that much to do.
There’s a debilitating cheapness that keeps this picture from reaching its true potential. I have no idea what the budget was — for all I know, it could have been bigger than the original film’s — but it feels at times like we’re watching a mock-up of what a movie called The Old Guard 2 might look like. A conceivably interesting long take halfway through has Andy walking down a street to see Quynh for the first time after all their years apart. As she walks, she finds herself passing through the centuries, her other comrades wandering in and out of frame in different period costumes, as though she’s moving through a corridor of her memories. It’s a good idea, the kind of bravura moment that could invest this reunion with real power, but it’s blocked so clumsily, with extras and other characters moving so awkwardly, that the whole thing falls totally flat. Another new arrival, Tuah (Henry Golding), is a scholarly immortal who spends most of his time in the fakest-looking library I’ve ever seen. Key characters drop out of the story. Important plot points that could mean something are paid off in the most cursory fashion. Promising dilemmas are either dropped entirely or resolved all too quickly.
And then, the movie just … ends. Or rather, it doesn’t. This is hard to explain without getting into vaguely spoiler-y territory, but The Old Guard 2 has no real finale. We’ve already been over the to-be-continued-ification of the modern blockbuster, with films now opting for cliffhangers instead of anything resembling a complete story with complete character arcs. Everybody has their own limits and preferences when it comes to stuff like this. (I didn’t much mind the incompleteness of Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter One, for example, because it felt built into the very rhythms of that particular picture.) But The Old Guard 2 doesn’t tease a sequel so much as sacrifice itself at the altar of one, killing what little suspense it might have built up by simply rolling credits, with the already half-baked story presumably to be resolved during some future installment. The whole thing feels so unresolved that it makes the plotus-interruptus of Across the Spider-Verse feel like the full 15-hour run of Berlin Alexanderplatz by comparison. That it all comes after one of the more nondescript action climaxes in recent memory exacerbates the disappointment. Is it possible there was a big, proper finale planned at some point and the producers decided to cut their losses? Or who knows, maybe this was the plan all along — to turn this once-promising movie into a television pilot. A bad one.
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