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Yahoo
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Old Guard 2,' Like Its Superheroes, Feels Ancient
So there are these immortals, y'see — folks who have been around for millennia, and are capable of healing from any wound, regenerating any severed limb. Cut off a finger? No problem! A group of these gifted, unkillable ass-kickers have banded together and, led by a centuries-old Scythian warrior named Andromache (Charlize Theron), will take on the dirtiest of mercenary jobs for a price. There's also Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), who fought in the Napoleonic Wars before joining up; Nicky (Martin Eden's Luca Marinelli), a former priest from Italy; and Joe (Marwan Kenzari), a former merchant from Iran. Both of these men first battled each other during the Crusades, continually trying to slay the other over many eras. The two eventually became lovers. 'Andy,' as she's known by her colleagues, runs a tight ship. Even when she's having issues with their latest recruit, a U.S. marine named Nile (KiKi Layne) who's just discovered she's an immortal, or is attempting to shield the group's existence from Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a nosy C.I.A agent, Andy watches everyone's backs and makes sure the job gets done. Calling themselves the Old Guard — get it? — they are the type of superheroic anti-heroes for whom ballads are written. Or comic books. Or screenplays that milk those comic books for a potentially lucrative franchise for a streaming service. More from Rolling Stone Lena Dunham Says She Took an 'Intentional Break' From Acting After 'Girls' Watch Liam Payne Offer Guidance to Aspiring Musicians in 'Building the Band' Trailer 'Trainwreck: Poop Cruise': 5 Things We Learned Anyone who's not a die-hard stan (a Guardhead?) will definitely need a refresher before going into The Old Guard 2, which just dropped on Netflix, as the sequel to the 2020 movie assumes that viewers know every bit of backstory backwards and forwards. An impressive take on Greg Rucka's comic book series that benefited from the writer adapting his own work, the original Old Guard had a lot going for it: Theron capitalizing on her post-Atomic Blonde action-flick chops, director Gina Prince-Blythewood (Love & Basketball) finding a nice balance between character development and choreographed fight sequences, a same-sex love story that felt genuinely romantic in a genre usually allergic to even token LGBTQ+ representation. What this second installment has in its favor is familiarity, a built-in fanbase — it remains one of Netflix's most popular original, blockbuster-style movies, according to Netflix — some extra star power in the form of Uma Thurman, and the fact that you don't need to extend much energy to pick up a remote control. That's really about it. Building off the deep lore of the first film and ending on a cliffhanger that telegraphs its creators are crossing their fingers for a third film, The Old Guard 2 is an extension of a story that takes your investment in these people, concepts, and situations. It's a new chapter in a saga, yet like its characters who've been practicing the art of war since Sun Tzu coined the term, the sequel somehow feels ancient and a little creaky. Remember Quynh (Victoria Ngo), Andy's old immortal running partner who was sealed in a sarcophagus and dropped into the sea, sentenced to a life of perpetual drowning? She's been found and retrieved by Thurman's all-purpose bad guy, who goes by the supervillain handle Discord. Remember how Andy mysteriously lost her powers of regeneration partway through the first film, which is a huge disadvantage when your whole deal is 'warrior for hire who can never be killed?' That's still an issue. Remember when Copley decided that, rather than bust these off-the-books mercs, he'd help conceal their identities? The former intelligence agent is now aiding them in missions that involve, say, the occasional siege on a Croatian crimelord's fortress. Remember how Booker was sentenced to a year-long exile after shooting Andy? He's still persona non grata, but not for long. Long story short, Discord has plans for using Quynh and her eye on Nile. This caricature of an all-powerful, morally bankrupt no-goodnik is actually the oldest immortal around. 'I was there, you know,' Discord says, staring at something offscreen. 'I can still remember it, the acrid stench of hate in the air.' Cut to: a painting of Jesus on the cross. [Slow clap] Nile, she believes, is the 'last immortal to ever be born,' and may hold the key to killing off everyone. Meanwhile, an immortal librarian named Tua (Henry Golding) thinks he knows why Andy lost her powers, and has a theory on how she might regain them. Theron can still pull off the fight scenes. Thurman can still handle a katana like an expert, even if it's not one forged by Hattori Hanzo. Marinelli and Kanzari's kiss-kiss-bicker-bicker double act is still charming, if a little underutilized. New director Victoria Mahoney (whose personal narrative arc is a thousand times more interesting, moving and compelling than anything happening here) throws in the occasionally inventive bit of filmmaking, as when she stages Andy walking through an alleyway that morphs from one historical period to the next with every step she takes. Shots are fired, punches are thrown, and things blow up real good. Everyone reads their lines clearly, hits their marks, and the camera stays in focus. There's a sneaking suspicion that, while Mahoney, Theron, her costars, and the crew are doing their best to sell this superhero story — and by extension a franchise that Netflix can use to produce numerous other sequels, possible TV spin-offs, etc. — in the most professional manner possible, The Old Guard 2 isn't quite the movie it wants you to think it is. Or rather, it's dangerously close to not being a movie at all so much as just one more piece of expensive 'content' that the streamer can slap into menus and use to game your viewing algorithms. If you have not been fully converted to Team Old Guard going into this, you will not click off your TV having suddenly become a O.G. devotee. And yet, because this has all of the busy bells and whistles we associate with blockbusters, it will likely be paraded as a runaway success story regardless. It's the oldest trick in the book. Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Best 'Saturday Night Live' Characters of All Time Denzel Washington's Movies Ranked, From Worst to Best 70 Greatest Comedies of the 21st Century
San Francisco Chronicle
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Review: ‘The Old Guard 2' is a lifeless sequel that should have stayed buried
In the miserable pandemic days of July 2020, the release of ' The Old Guard ' brought some modest relief. Here was an intelligent superhero movie about a group of mercenaries with one specific but limited power: They were immortal. Aside from that, they were normal people, subject to pain, temporary injury, emotional disturbance and capture. The limitations of their power made for a better and less scattered story than we'd come to expect, and 'The Old Guard' emerged as the best superhero movie since ' Black Panther ' (2018). It also seemed to point in a positive direction for the genre altogether, with its concentration on human-scale superheroes. While the original was serious, 'Old Guard 2' is merely forlorn. Its story holds little interest and, to make matters worse, it doesn't even end. Instead, it stops mid-story, promising a sequel that feels less like a promise than a threat. There's one haunting element, however, that makes good use of the movie's premise. Veronica Ngo plays Quynh, an immortal who, in the 16th century is accused of witchcraft and is sealed in an iron coffin before being thrown into the sea. But she doesn't just drown — she spends 500 years drowning, dying and waking up alive and drowning again, in an endless cycle of torture. Understandably, when she is finally pulled up from the depths centuries later, she is slightly miffed at Andromache (Charlize Theron), a fellow immortal who promised to rescue her and never did. Accordingly, Quynh teams up with Andromache's sworn enemy, Discord (Uma Thurman), whose entire mission in life is to destroy Andromache and her comradely band of fellow immortals. The movie operates with the idea that these immortals, working behind the scenes, are essential to the survival of humanity. But we can't really believe it this time out. 'The Old Guard 2' begins with Andromache and her compatriots killing dozens of security guards in a massive mansion. We have no idea why they're doing this. We have no reason to hate the people they're slaughtering and, five years since the last movie, we have no particular reason to like Andromache's team. It's just action for the sake of action. Thus, when Discord shows up and starts causing trouble for the Old Guard, the fatal two-word thought enters the mind: Who cares? Likewise, when Discord puts her cards on the table and reveals that she wants to 'end immortal interference' in the affairs of mortals, we can't help but think, 'OK. Fine. Is that really such a terrible idea?' It's like when you go into a voting booth and read a proposition that you have no strong feelings about. 'Hmm, 'ending immortal interference.' That could be OK. Is that really a bad thing? Should I be against that?' Clearly, 'The Old Guard 2,' like some propositions, is something you can skip, knowing you don't have a dog in that fight. Or, to put it another way, this is a movie with two big problems: We're not worried about the fate of the Old Guard in terms of what it might mean for humans, in general, and we're not particularly worried about the members of the Old Guard themselves, because they seem so unhappy being alive forever that we can't help thinking they might be better off dead.
The Guardian
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Geneviève Page obituary
Screen and stage were not equal suitors for the affections of the French actor Geneviève Page, who once described working in cinema as a case of coitus interruptus. 'You start a scene, you rehearse it, you're ready. Then they do the sound and lighting. There comes a moment when you've got to charge in. And then: 'Cut!' It annoyed me each time,' Page told France Culture in 2009. 'Whereas when you arrive in your theatre dressing room in the evening, you know it'll start soon and you'll see it through right to the end.' Page, who has died aged 97, built a heavyweight theatre portfolio over more than five decades; she played roles such as Hermione in Euripides's Andromache, Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and the Fassbinder heroine Petra von Kant. But her film career had a stuttering rhythm, with the French industry never truly finding a place for her. Her melodramatic ardour and throaty timbre were not a natural fit in demure starlet roles; with her long neck and upwardly canted nose, her beauty had a certain haughtiness. Starting with the 1956 film noir Foreign Intrigue, opposite Robert Mitchum, Page instead found better deployment abroad in a series of beguiling impact roles: most notably as a princess offering a safe haven in the 1961 epic El Cid; the high-class brothel madam who gives Catherine Deneuve her soubriquet, Belle de Jour, in Luis Buñuel's 1967 masterpiece; and a German Mata Hari in Billy Wilder's revisionist detective story The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970). But she showed her true allegiance in the week in the late 1950s when she both signed a lucrative three-picture deal in Hollywood and joined France's prestigious Théâtre National Populaire (TNP), then under the stewardship of Jean Vilar, creator of the Avignon theatre festival. For Page, the latter was the big coup. 'I was proud as a peacock. I was under the impression I'd won the biggest medal possible,' Page told France Culture. 'Not in terms of being an actress, but in terms of being a person. It was their ethic and way of doing things: committing to the deepest level.' She was born in Paris, the second child of Jacques Bonjean, an art collector and gallerist, and his wife, Germaine (nee Lipman), a member of the family of Jewish watchmakers who founded the Lip brand. Geneviève and her older brother, Michel, grew up in this bourgeois-aesthete milieu with a young Christian Dior – with whom her father had founded his gallery – as her godfather. She was a bookworm whose imaginative tendencies brought her closer to her father, who was also a poet. 'I was constantly grabbing people to say: 'Look! Look at what I've just read!'' she recalled. 'And after a while, they'd say: 'Very nice, Geneviève. Now go back to your room.' Except for my father. So, from the moment he started taking an interest in me, that made life smoother.' After making her film debut in the 1950 Franco-German portmanteau film Ce Siècle à Cinquante Ans, Page's first role of note was as the Marquise de Pompadour in the 1952 swashbuckler Fanfan la Tulipe. Simultaneously, she took theatre lessons with the method-influenced Russian actor Tania Balachova and then at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique in Paris. This led to initial roles with the Comédie-Française, before – thanks to an introduction from her Fanfan co-star Gérard Philipe – she joined the TNP. Her father vetoed her going to Rome to film I Vitelloni for Federico Fellini, who could offer no script to reassure them about what she would perform. But Page made disconcerting choices of her own, picking out the role of a casino dancer paid to escort a bus driver who deems himself too ugly to be loved in The Strange Desire of Mr Bard (1954). In 1959 she married the businessman and future Club Med managing director Jean-Claude Bujard; they subsequently had two children, Thomas and Adélaïde. Casting around intrepidly for roles in the 60s, she also shot with the directors George Cukor (on the 1960 Liszt biopic Song Without End), John Frankenheimer (the Formula One drama Grand Prix, 1966) and Terence Young (the 1968 period tragedy Mayerling). Page auditioned for the surrealist Buñuel shortly after an accident in her Jaguar E-type; he was captivated by her bruised features and cast her as the stringent Madame Anaïs in Belle de Jour. Page was called upon to briefly kiss Deneuve on the lips, and the director asked her to do it without warning. 'I told him that if she slapped me, I'd give her one back,' Page later told Le Point. Bertrand Blier's Buffet Froid, in 1979, also exploited this sexually forbidding aura with her role as a nymphomaniac widow. All the while, Page continued her love affair with the stage. Playing Petra Kant for the Théâtre National de Chaillot earned her the French critics' union award for best actress in 1980; in 1997, she won the Prix Plaisir for her role as a monstrous grand dame of the theatre in Jean Anouilh's Colombe. Her final stage appearance was in 2011, playing the Roman empress Agrippina in Racine's 1669 play Britannicus. 'A bit wild, a bit daring, a bit nasty when needed,' was how Page summed up the majority of her stage roles. 'My dream since I was 25 or 30 was to play a wife, not particularly distinguished, in front of a sink with her children. Something more quotidian. But no one ever offered me that.' Her husband died in 2011. She is survived by Thomas and Adélaïde, and five grandchildren Adélie, Zoé, Balthazar, Géo and Nestor. Geneviève Page, actor, born 13 December 1927; died 14 February 2025
