‘The Old Guard 2' Review: Charlize Theron Leads Her Team of Immortals in Another, Lesser Battle

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'The Old Guard 2' opens with one of those 'extravagant' violent preludes — in this case, the lit-like-a-Swiffer-commercial Netflix version — that's trying to be like something out of an old James Bond movie: a sequence in which the over-the-top quality is linked to how little we're told about what's actually going on. Andy (Charlize Theron), in sunglasses and dark hair, is leading her team ­— I call them the I-Team, because they're immortal and kick ass — as they infiltrate a villa swarming with guards, who they dispatch in one-on-one confrontations, mostly by stabbing them to death. They're trying to get to some Mr. Big, who turns out to be an anonymous dude in red silk pajamas who gets destroyed like everyone else. This showy yet meaningless appetizer of a sequence is Bondian in theory, but as soon as Andy and her team return to their headquarters, plotting whatever comes next, the mood starts to veer closer to that of a 'Fast and Furious' movie. Except that 'The Old Guard 2' doesn't have that 'Fast and the Furious' energy. It's more like 'The Languid and the Bothered.'
Five years ago this week, 'The Old Guard' was released on Netflix, and I confess that it's not exactly a movie that has stayed with me. Yet as directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, it had more get-up-and-go than this logy, morose, overly self-important and solemnly 'meditative' second chapter. Prince-Bythewood didn't return for the sequel. The new director is Victoria Mahoney, who doesn't quite seem to realize that she's making 'The Expendables Pt. 9' with self-healing limbs.
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'The Old Guard 2,' now that it's officially holding down the center of a franchise, takes the 'Old Guard' mythology inordinately seriously. It wouldn't be the first movie based on a graphic novel to do so. Greg Rucka, the writer of the 'Old Guard' graphic novel series, co-wrote the script of 'The Old Guard 2' (with Sarah L. Walker) and is one of the film's executive producers, and he obviously wants us to feel immersed in the high drama of these immortals, the drama being that they live forever…until they don't. They can wake up on any given day and learn that their immortality is gone.
That's what happened to Andy midway through the first film, and now, as she copes with her vulnerable new status, she's besieged by figures from her past — like Quynh (Veronica Van), the fierce warrior she fought alongside for 1,500 years, until Quynh was found guilty of witchcraft and locked in an iron maiden and dropped to the bottom of the sea. (That kind of chilled the friendship.) Quynh is now seeking vengeance on Andy and the world, a quest that has allied her with a new character named Discord, who also comes from the past but is played by Uma Thurman with a corporate hauteur that doesn't exactly make her seem like someone who came up through the Middle Ages.
There's a good extended shot where Andy strolls through a passageway in Rome, walking by people from her past as the place slowly turns back in time. We're supposed to be seeing her memories, and there should have been more of that. But for all the talk of centuries gone by, 'The Old Guard 2' feels like a time-tripping action fantasy made on the cheap. The issue of who's immortal or not, and how you can turn immortal (or have that ability taken away), starts to seem part of some arbitrary movie game, like 'Who's got the detonator?' And the actors, trapped in what is too often an empty somber talkfest, seem stranded in a way that they weren't in the first film.
Theron is physically commanding, and when Andy and Quynh face off in an alleyway the movie briefly comes alive. But the comic-book soap opera of their ruptured bond is too abstract to take hold. KiKi Layne's Nile still has her cleansing fierceness, Henry Golding plays a new immortal, Tuah, who isn't given enough to do, while Matthias Schoenaerts, as the beleaguered Booker (who sold the group out and now wants back in), gets a little too hangdoggy. Chiwetel Ejiofor, as Copley the CIA agent turned I-Team ally, lends his crisp panache to lines like 'It would be ill-advised to discharge any firearm in the vicinity of the core.' The core, in this case, refers to a Chinese nuclear reactor, hidden in Indonesia, that Discord has threatened to blow up. It's all part of her stab at immortality, but by the end of 'The Old Guard 2' it's mostly the clichés that seem to be living forever.
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