At 6,732 years old — give or take a handful of years — Andromache of Scythia (Charlize Theron), Andy for short, would classify as an immortal… or as close to one as possible.

Andy doesn’t die, despite the millions of times she is hacked and slashed by blades, or frayed by gunfire; her bloodied and battered complexion repairs itself to near-perfection over and over again. Her affliction isn’t scientific, nor supernatural. It’s just there, irrespective of logic or reason. She just lives, stuck in a perpetual un-aging bubble, as the world turns old and technologically-driven in front of her.

With so much lifespan at one’s disposal, Andy, and others like her, will have pondered every big question imaginable... off-camera. As far as this movie is concerned, the people in it are busy shooting holes in each other.

For an action movie, would you expect anything other than impossible feats of derring-do and unending barrages of bullets?

No?

The Old Guard is about immortality and could be dealing with heavy questions but the people in it are too busy shooting holes in each other

I thought as much.

Greg Rucka’s adaptation of his own comic book series The Old Guard may very well be a trend-setting anomaly in Hollywood. The comic was picked up by David Ellison’s Skydance the year it was published. Three years later, the finished motion picture, starring Theron and Chiwetel Ejiofor, hits Netflix.

In project development terms (the time it takes for an idea to be turned into a motion picture), this is as fast as things can get — provided the term fast exists in the studio system in the first place. Still, for better or worse, this tent-pole actioner from the production house responsible for 6 Underground, Terminator: Dark Fate, Gemini Man, the last three Mission: Impossible movies and the three recent Star Trek movies, whips up a concoction that’s easy to enjoy.

Rucka, a comic book scribe who has penned a lot of DC and some Marvel stories, didn’t rework most of his comic’s original script. The five issue original series, drawn by Leandro Fernández, is as tight as it is cinematic. In fact, locations, flashbacks, and other minute aspects of the story have been toned down a little too much in the film version.

It’s a crime, really. Some added film-quality oomph could have elevated things visually — especially the one-line plot.

Let me try to sum it up in a sentence: Betrayed by an ex-CIA contact, four nearly immortal soldiers, working clandestine jobs to help those in need, are hounded by a pharmaceutical mogul intent on exploiting the secrets of their centuries’ old life, as a newfound member joins their ranks.

The new recruit is Nile Freeman (KiKi Lyne), a US Marine stationed in Afghanistan, whose throat is slashed by a militant radical who prefers cowering behind women. Resurrecting from the dead creeps out Nile’s war-hardened peers, but luckily she is kidnapped by Andy moments before being shifted off to a US military facility for tests.

A dead-shot in the middle of her noggin later (it was the quickest way to explain things), Niles begins grasping the significance of her newfound lease on life, and why she can’t go back to her family ever again.

But fret not, because Andy and Nile have a bit of a mother-daughter vibe when they aren’t kicking each other’s kneecaps off (Theron and Lyne have an impressively choreographed, no-holds-barred go at one another in a cargo plane).

The film purposely takes a bit of a breather between action set-pieces, where some bits of backstories are thrown our way. For instance, there is a romantic exchange between two of Andy’s cohorts, Joe and Nicky (Marwan Kenzari, Luca Marinelli), to the grossed out reactions of their captors, or a brief backstory where Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), the fourth member of the group, explains why immortals should sever ties with loved ones.

Everyone, including the nearly wasted Ejiofor, are grounded with some measure of believability. That is, everyone except the curly-haired big pharma boss Merrick played by Harry Melling, who is probably the worst casting decision I’ve seen this year.

Since she is the lead, and her presence nearly obscures everyone in her screen space, I could go into the emotional turmoil, vulnerability and the conflicted morals Andy suffers through, which Theron bull’s-eyes with a consistent melancholic undertone. But that would be akin to giving The Old Guard a slap on the back for something it hardly achieves. Most of the heavy stuff comes and goes without excessive dramatics anyways.

Gina Prince-Bythewood (Secret Life of Bees, Beyond the Lights), the director, doesn’t indulge in clichéd theatrics either. Some scenes, edit and narrative calls work, some don’t. One can see the twists and turns, and even the post-credit sequence, coming a mile away. Not that it’s a turn-off. In fact, I’d prefer a sequel sooner rather than later.

A Netflix Original release, The Old Guard is rated 18+ for scenes of back-breaking carnage, bloody bullet-holes and a slowly-healing stomach wound. Honestly, there is nothing in here above PG-13. Teens have probably seen much worse.

Published in Dawn, ICON, July 19th, 2020