At the risk of repeating myself, repetitive, lazy narratives can be tedious and dull when regurgitated incessantly without grace for how things evolve. But the Netflix cliché—many or most of their original films tend to fall under “folding laundry” movies—unfortunately, remains mostly true after all these years, and especially so with the dreadfully boring and unengaging “The Old Guard 2.”
Presumptuous across the board, it’s eye-rolling ending, and the way it’s written—arrogantly assuming you’re a superfan and remember all the details of the first, largely forgettable, film and how it ended.
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For the painful recap, following a team of immortal mercenaries on a revenge mission, at the end of “The Old Guard,” Booker/Sebastian Le Livre (Matthias Schoenaerts) was sentenced to “loneliness” (lol, read: exile) for betraying the group and Andromache “Andy” of Scythia (Charlize Theron), the team’s leader, had lost her immortality. The character Quynh (Van Veronica Ngo), referenced in the original film as a long-lost immortal companion of Andy’s who was drowned at sea, appeared in the post credits, surprising a drunken Booker in his excommunicated apartment.
So this is where “The Old Guard 2” comes in with the return of Quynh. Through some very inelegant flashbacks, we learn that Andy was present when Quynh was sent to the death chamber at the bottom of the sea and her “death”—since immortals never truly die—was witnessed by two other immortals heretofore never seen, Discord (Uma Thurman), the original immortal and Tuah (Henry Golding).
Of course, centuries later, Discord rescues and retrieves Quynh for her nefarious needs and a devious plot to destroy all immortals but herself. Of course, Quynh, bitter that Andy, her bff, never found her and gave up the centuries-long effort to find her, she’s basically teamed up with Discord for revenge.
Meanwhile, Tuah, a kind of ancient sage immortal believes that the newest immortal, Nile (KiKi Layne) is a “destroyer” who can turn immortals mortal.
Meanwhile, Andy struggles to find her place in the world as a mortal, but her team is drawn out of hiding thanks to the machinations of Quynh and Discord’s plot.
Booker returns, trying to find forgiveness and redemption, and spoiler alert, it all feels like just a middling vignette of episodic TV and a weak excuse to set up a sequel no one asked for.
Directed by Victoria Mahoney (“Yelling To The Sky”), “The Old Guard 2,” is deeply dull, uninvolving and a film so monotonous it almost seems engineered explicitly so you can either be on your phone and or folding laundry and don’t need to be worried about missing anything critical, because none of it is essentially or engaging.
Written by Greg Rucka and Sarah L. Walker, the action drama is either tin-eared, risible first-draft dialogue or just a painful delivery method of obvious and cloying exposition.
“The Old Guard 2” is full of great actors, including Charlize Theron, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Matthias Schoenaerts, and Luca Marinelli. Still, it’s telling just how bad the screenplay and movie are that none of them fare well in this clumsily written and crafted movie.
Generic music by Steffen Thum and Ruth Barrett doesn’t help a generic film. While Mahoney’s action sequences lensed by the celebrated cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (“The Hurt Locker,” “Captain Phillips”), are pretty decent in a vacuum, on balance, in the context of the film, they’re meaningless given the drama is inert, the characterization flat and basic and the audience can never once give a damn what the hell is happening because “The Old Guard” never earns your sympathy and seems to coast under the false presumption that audiences actually loved and cared about these characters to begin with.
The fact is, a product of the pandemic, “The Old Guard” wasn’t very good, but it hit the spot at the time when expectations were rock bottom and everyone needed low-IQ escapism. With that period far from memory, “The Old Guard 2” is exposed for what the series always was to begin with: a bland, run-of-the-mill genre thriller with a great cast convinced to be there, not because of remarkable material, but because of Netflix budgets and dollars exorbitant enough to persuade A-list actors to forget about the C-list material they’ve been given, because a new addition to their mansions is worth the brief slumming.
Now it’s generally odious to be this cynical in a film review, but that’s for twenty-year-olds out of college, right? But “The Old Guard 2” is so offensively average and aggressively phoned-in that it engenders this kind of pessimistic ill will.
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Worse, as mentioned, “The Old Guard 2” is essentially just a part one; the filmmakers and studio are presumptuous enough to delude themselves into thinking audiences are craving more. Netflix’s algorithm, ultimately, may prove me wrong, and laundry-folders googling this and that at the same time, may have low standards for the unchallenging, easy-to-follow film, but for anyone who even gives even the remotest care about movies, god forbid you dare to waste your time with this utterly disposable discard. [D]