‘That woman has forgotten more ways to kill than entire armies will ever learn…’
The Old Guard is not the type of film that I would usually be attracted to. A comic book adaptation. A Netflix original. A modern day action movie. These are not usually things to get excited by. It was the presence of Charlize Theron that drew me to the project, and while I won’t be rushing to watch the already derided sequel, The Old Guard has enough about it to work as a Sunday afternoon time killer…
There is a lot of plot here. Basically, Theron and a bunch of other character actors play a group of mercenaries with unexplained regenerative powers. They’re like vampires, but without the blood sucking, aversion to sunlight or dodgy accents. In true X-Men style, Steven Merrick (Harry Melling), an evil pharmaceutical executive, wishes to capture our heroes in order to harvest their DNA and use it to create a miracle cure that will then make him very rich. There are other plot strands, some of them important, some of them not.
While the opening of The Old Guard is so derivative that I nearly turned it off, things do pick up when KiKi Layne shows up as Nile Freeman, the newest recruit to the army of the invincibles. There is a genuinely moving flashback scene where we learn why Theron’s character is so tortured (it also introduces a concept so terrifying that it literally makes me panic just thinking about it), and some excellent action sequences, but beyond this, The Old Guard delivers pretty much what you would expect from a Netflix original designed to appeal to the broadest group of people possible.
The Old Guard is not a bad film, but its not a memorable one either. Theron completists will enjoy her steely-eyed stoicism, and the action set-pieces are suitably high-octane and fun, but don’t expect anything radical.
