Netflix released The Old Guard on July 10, 2020, with a clean premise: four mercenaries who cannot stay dead, a new one who never asked for it, and a pharmaceutical executive who wants to sell their secret. Gina Prince-Bythewood directed. Greg Rucka wrote the script from his own comic book series. Charlize Theron leads as Andy, or Andromache of Scythia, a warrior who has been fighting for centuries and is tired in a way the film takes seriously.
Trailer, via Netflix.
Andy and the Marine in Afghanistan
The team breaks its own rule in South Sudan, taking a job to rescue kidnapped girls from the same employer twice. The mission is a setup. Their client, James Copley, films them dying and healing, then sells the footage to Steven Merrick, who runs a pharmaceutical company and wants to know how their cells work.
Meanwhile, U.S. Marine Nile Freeman has her throat slit in Afghanistan and wakes up without a scratch. She starts dreaming of the others. They start dreaming of her. That link is the film’s best invention, a quiet rule that turns strangers into a family whether they like it or not.
The Safe House in France
Andy pulls Nile out of Afghanistan before the military can ship her off for testing, then takes her to a safe house in France. There Nile meets Booker, Joe and Nicky, and learns the mechanic that gives The Old Guard its weight: the healing stops. Without warning. It happened to Lykon, an immortal who came before them.
The cast does the work:
- Charlize Theron as Andy, the oldest and the most worn down
- KiKi Layne as Nile Freeman, the new one
- Matthias Schoenaerts as Booker
- Marwan Kenzari as Joe
- Luca Marinelli as Nicky
- Chiwetel Ejiofor as Copley
- Harry Melling as Merrick
Quynh and the Iron Maiden
Nile dreams of drowning inside an iron maiden, over and over. The others explain. Quynh was the first immortal Andy found besides herself. She was sentenced for witchcraft and cast into the sea in that iron maiden roughly 500 years ago. The others have never found her. She has been drowning ever since, and Andy carries the guilt for it.
That is the film’s real subject. Not the fights, which are good, but the arithmetic of living forever while someone you love is trapped and you cannot reach her. It is a bleak idea, and the movie does not flinch from it.
Merrick and the Ambush
Merrick’s operatives hit the safe house. Joe and Nicky are captured. Booker appears to be dead and is left behind. The film keeps its action legible and its stakes personal, which is harder than it sounds.
Theron and Layne at the Center
The Old Guard treats immortality as a burden rather than a gift. Theron plays Andy as someone who has stopped expecting anything good, and Layne plays Nile as someone still deciding whether to accept what she has become. Their scenes together carry the movie.
The tagline is “Forever is harder than it looks,” and the film earns it. The healing is not a superpower here. It is a debt that keeps compounding.
Merrick Never Becomes More Than an Obstacle
The villain is the weak point. Merrick wants to bottle the immortals’ biology and sell it, and Harry Melling plays him as a smug executive, but the character never becomes more than an obstacle. Copley’s betrayal has more texture, and the film does not spend enough time on it.
The mythology also raises a question it does not answer. If the healing can stop at any time, the team is living on borrowed time, and the movie uses that mostly as exposition rather than dread. A sequel could fix that. This one just plants it.
What The Old Guard Leaves Behind
The Old Guard is a strong action film with an unusually sad center. Prince-Bythewood keeps the set pieces clear and the emotions close to the surface, and Rucka’s script respects its own rules. It is not a great film, but it is a serious one, and it treats its audience as capable of handling a story about people who have lived too long and lost too much.
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