The Image Comics series The Old Guard, from writer Greg Rucka and artist Leandro Fernandez, is a stylish and fast-paced meditation on aging, featuring a team of immortal mercenaries led by Andromache of Scythia (who goes by "Andy"), a warrior more than 6,000 years old. In Gina Prince-Bythewood's feature film adaptation, also written by Rucka, Andy (Charlize Theron) takes a bit of a back seat to team newcomer Nile (KiKi Layne), and the moody look of Fernandez's art is replace by generic action-movie gloss. Andy still has her cool-looking battle axe, but otherwise there isn't much to distinguish The Old Guard from Netflix's other second-rate action movies.
And without the visual flair to back it up, a lot of Rucka’s writing just comes off as clunky, full of awkward exposition (“I lead a team of immortals,” Andy tells Nile bluntly when they first meet) and clichés (“Go big or go home,” Andy says as the team heads into a showdown). As she’s proved in movies like Mad Max: Fury Road and Atomic Blonde, Theron is one of the best action stars of the past decade, and she brings a sense of casual power to Andy, who’s been taking down foes for thousands of years. She also adds a bit of melancholy to the role of the weary immortal, although not quite as much as in the comic, which devotes more space to history and mythology.
The movie focuses a lot more on its familiar tech-tycoon villain, pharmaceutical company CEO Merrick (Harry Melling), who is determined to capture Andy and her team and discover their secret to immortality. To that end, he hires former CIA agent Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), one of the team’s old contacts, to enlist them for a fake job rescuing kidnapped girls in South Sudan. That’s where Andy, Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli) first show off their uncanny regenerative abilities, after they’ve been pumped full of bullets by Merrick’s men.
They make their escape, but it’s only a matter of time before Merrick will catch up to them again, so they work on tracking Copley while also heading to Afghanistan to pick up Nile, whose arrival as an immortal they’ve witnessed in their dreams. A U.S. Marine, Nile miraculously recovers after an Afghan insurgent slashes her throat, and in the familiar manner of newly emerged superheroes, she can’t believe what’s happening to her. Obviously she’s going to step up and join the team, so the arc of Andy convincing her to embrace her powers and her destiny is a little tedious, although Theron sells Andy’s breezy confidence at thrusting herself and Nile into dangerous situations to prove that their powers are real.
While the comic is firmly rooted in Andy’s perspective, the movie turns Nile into the point-of-view character, which makes sense for providing an audience surrogate, but mostly just kills the story’s momentum while she demands various answers from Andy and the rest of the team. Layne made an impressive breakthrough in Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk, but here she mainly looks lost, especially compared to Theron’s steely intensity.
The men on the team mostly fade into the background, which lessens the impact of a predictable third-act twist meant to represent a deep fracturing of the team. These people have been working together for centuries, but there’s little sense of their personal connection to each other. Even the supposed epic romance between Nicky and Joe is represented in a single speech that seems to come out of nowhere.
But this movie isn’t really about angst or romance, and on the action front, it often delivers, especially in the close-quarters combat scenes that demonstrate how Andy really has honed her skills over the course of millennia. Prince-Bythewood, who is still potentially attached to direct Marvel feature Silver & Black, delivers some intense, exciting action sequences here, even if they’re mostly stuck in anonymous hallways and hideouts. Merrick and Copley are underwhelming villains, although Melling does some decent megalomaniacal ranting. Since the main characters can’t die, there isn’t a lot at stake here, despite efforts to add some genuine peril to the story.
And of course the entire movie is just a drawn-out origin story, in the typical manner of modern franchise-launching blockbusters. There’s even a Marvel-style mid-credits scene teasing a new development for a potential sequel. Instead of hinting at an enticing wider world, though, it just makes the movie feel like an extended TV pilot with a larger budget, further diminishing the importance of the particular threat the team has faced. The comic has a sense of grandeur that’s missing here, even if Booker makes brief mention of his time as a Napoleonic soldier and Andy has her own Rodin statue stashed in one of her safe houses. Rather than explore the ennui of its immortal characters, the movie just turns them into a knock-off superhero team.
Starring Charlize Theron, KiKi Layne, Matthias Schoenaerts, Marwan Kenzari, Luca Marinelli, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Harry Melling, The Old Guard premieres July 10 on Netflix.