Working title: Highlander But More Bullets
Stream Gems is a weekly feature where we highlight a film streaming on one of the big streaming services. No particular method to the selection, but the featured films are a) worth a watch and b) at or under two hours.
The Old Guard (Netflix, 2020) was a mixed bag for me. I recommend it for a couple of reasons, but with a Scythia-sized grain of salt.
First off, let’s just state the obvious. Charlize Theron is one of our greatest-living action stars. We got that out of the way. Cool. This movie should be appointment viewing if only because Theron stars in it and she doesn’t have anything else set to release until next year at the earliest. On top of this, her only movie set for 2021 release is F9 (or, The Fast & The Furious 9 if you aren’t into the whole “words have no meaning” approach to the Fast sequel nomenclature), and her character in F8te of the Furious (F8 of the Furious? Feight of the Furious?) was underwritten and not interesting. AND it was announced that the Furiosa (Mad Max) prequel will star a younger actress rather than Theron. So what I’m really, really trying to convey here is that you kind of have to watch this one since the pickings are slim for the foreseeable future.
Second, the movie is well shot and occasionally interesting. I’d call it better than Six Underground but worse than Extraction, to use two other recent Netflix releases. It is smarter than those two movies in that it addresses some heavy ideas, but structure-wise I was a step ahead of each reveal and I wasn’t trying that hard.
I like when the movie takes time to dwell on how immortality (and the trauma of dying countless times, only to be reborn) would take its toll on a person’s psyche. Particularly arresting is the characters’ tale of Quynt, whose fate is memorable and horrifying. Booker’s (Matthias Schoenaerts) story about outliving his children is also more pathos than most movies like this get. Unfortunately, the couple of scenes where these moments happen feel like bottle episodes of a TV show sandwiched between globe-trotting showdowns.
The showdowns are pretty rad, for what it’s worth. Because of the unique structure of these characters (i.e., they can be wounded and feel pain, but can’t die), the fights involve some cool logistics, such as using their hands or torsos to block gun muzzles. The hand-to-hand choreography is fantastic, although the characters’ centuries of military experience mean that not a single antagonist is a match for them for more than a few seconds. The editing in the fight scenes is a little more frenetic than I’d prefer (see Haywire as a counterpoint) but still clear enough that one gets an idea of the each figure’s relation to each other within the scene.
A quick synopsis: there are some (four) people on earth who, for reasons entirely unknown to them, cannot die. Andromache/Andy of Scythia (Theron) has gathered these people together, and over time they’ve been involved in countless battles and rescue missions. A pharma bro named Steven Merrick (Harry Melling) learns about them and wants to figure out how this immortality works so that he can monetize it, so his mercenaries are hunting them down. Thrown into this mess is a fifth new immortal named Nile Freeman (the quite excellent KiKi Layne), a Marine who dies in Afghanistan, only to wake up healed in a hospital bed at the army base. Nile is the audience cipher, and it is a credit to the script and her performance that we still feel the stakes for her character even though we know that she cannot die.
The biggest flaw with the film is, for me, a fatal flaw. The entire plot hinges on Merrick and Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor, underused) attempting to capture the Old Guard against their will and do medical experiments on them. This entire movie falls apart if, instead of spending countless lives to achieve this goal, Copley just asked Andy et al. to take part in the medical research. The characters, from the first scene, want to do good and feel like they aren’t doing enough to offset all of the bad in the world. Being involved in research that potentially eradicates dementia and cancer and who knows what else seems like it would be an easy sell. But instead, we get murder squads and kidnapping and involuntary medical tests. Just a quick early scene in which they discuss and reject Merrick’s offer would fix this, so that when he does dispatch his mercenaries to capture them, it feels like the escalation of a desperate man.
I also did not like the pop music in the film’s dramatic scenes in lieu of a traditional movie score. For me, this always undercuts the emotional weight of the acting in a scene, and always feels like bad TV show shortcutting (at least in TV, it makes sense to license preexisting music when you have to crank out 22 episodes of a show per season). The use of diegetic pop music is great (such as the scene where Nile listens to Frank Ocean), but seeing the emotional climax of the film scored to Marshmello takes me on a trip to Grey’s Anatomy via Garden State.
Overall, I give the film a weak recommend. I think that a person could easily ignore the flaws and just enjoy the action scenes and the occasional bits of philosophizing. The movie is basically a slightly smarter Highlander. Gina Prince-Bythewood has made an entertaining action movie, and when the inevitable sequel releases, I’ll be there to watch it. If the final scene is any indication, the Old Guard will have a more worthwhile opponent the next time around.
The Old Guard released on Netflix on July 10, 2020.