The Old Guard

Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.

Comic book adaptation The Old Guard sees a group of four mysteriously immortal eternal warriors thrown into disarray when an ex-CIA goon and a Big Pharma conglomerate team up to hunt them down and extract their secrets, all while they’re trying to bring a new member of the self-resurrection society up to speed.

That’s pretty much as disparaging as I mean it to be. For the purposes of science, I hooked this film up to the Morris Industries Schlock-o-meter, and it returned a value of 200% Schlock, previously thought theoretically impossible or at least medically inadvisable. Thankfully, I kind of love schlock, so it’s more bearable than other Netflix action misfires like 6 Underground or Extraction. However, I’m not going to argue that it’s anything other than nonsense on toast.

Our bunch of extant immortals, played by Charlize Theron, Matthias Schoenaerts, Marwan Kenzari, and Luca Marinelli are all underutilised but do what’s asked of them well enough – I quite like the relationship between Kenzari and Marinelli, which is refreshingly non-Marvel-ly – and KiKi Layne as the newcomer does what’s asked well enough in the sort of thankless, exposition question asker role that’s hobbling her. Likewise this material’s generic enough that it’s not going on Chiwetel Ejiofor’s show-reel, but again he’s rather overqualified for the role.

The only fish out of water here is Harry Melling as the snivelling CEO type, with a performance that would probably be bettered by an actual fish out of water.

The action sequences are, I’ll go as far to say acceptable, maybe? At least the ridiculous stuff here is supposed to be ridiculous, unlike the aforementioned Netflix clunkers, and the central concept is interesting enough that I can imagine these characters doing something a bit more engaging in a sequel that’s not lumbered with this amount of backstory and lore to clunkily exposition their way through.

Any such sequel could do with having a bit more cash thrown at the production budget, though. I was surprised to see this pegged at $70 million dollars, and can only assume six sevenths of that has gone into the actor’s pay-cheques as it resolutely does not appear to have that reflected on screen, unless those CG limbs unbreaking themselves have gone up in cost since Blade did it years ago.

This is very much a thing that you can watch, if you want to. It’s an undemanding distraction in a time when we very much need it, but in normal circumstances ignoring it would be a much better option. Still, this might well be the only release this year that feels vaguely similar to the tentpoles that would be cluttering up our multiplexes at this time of the year, so there’s perhaps some small psychological comfort to take from this otherwise mediocre, yet somehow still Netflix’s best, action film attention candidate.