At The Movies: Netflix sequel The Old Guard 2 squanders immortal potential
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(From left) Henry Golding as Tuah, Luca Marinelli as Nicky, Marwan Kenzari as Joe, Charlize Theron as Andy and Kiki Layne as Nile in The Old Guard 2.
PHOTO: NETFLIX
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The Old Guard 2 (R21)
196 minutes, available on Netflix
★★☆☆☆
The story: Following the events of The Old Guard (2020), mercenary team leader Andy (Charlize Theron) is no longer immortal, unlike her comrades, who have retained their infinite healing powers. The team must confront powerful beings looking to settle scores: Discord (Uma Thurman), an ancient one with a grudge against humanity, and Quynh (Ngo Thanh Van), newly freed from the undersea cage that Andy failed to save her from hundreds of years ago.
The Old Guard 2 is one of those movies in which viewers are supposed to sit back and watch cool things happen: car chases, gun battles, martial arts showdowns. It involves good guys gifted with regenerative healing, a neat way of avoiding the plot armour problems associated with protagonists who walk through a hailstorm of bullets unscathed.
The story, based on a graphic novel series of the same name, blends the supernatural with reality by simply not addressing the woo-woo parts – the origins of the healing powers, and why only certain people have them, are mostly left unexplained. Are the regenerative powers genetic? Are the chosen ones demi-gods or touched by divine grace? The franchise so far has revealed little.
With one caveat – in this sequel, new characters are introduced, not only for the sake of dramatic conflict but also to deepen the world in which immortality superpowers exist.
The wrinkles do not try to explain the source of the powers – a wise creative decision that avoids the problem of one premise requiring another, ad nauseam – but to allow for immortal-on-immortal combat and all the gore that these entail.
Quynh, the immortal whose body was caged in iron then dropped into the sea where she has relived the pain of drowning over and over for centuries, has returned.
Vietnamese actress Van, known for her martial arts roles in Furie (2019) and the prequel Furies (2022), is tragically underused.
Director Victoria Mahoney, taking over from Gina Prince-Bythewood, elicits good performances from her cast, in particular Theron and Van, but chooses to leave Quynh’s mental trauma largely unexplored. Mahoney also fails to relieve the story’s predictability, where it seems every meeting between Andy and a former acquaintance starts with tense dialogue followed by a martial arts showdown.
New to the franchise is Malaysia-born British actor Henry Golding, who plays Tuah, an immortal who has chosen to be the group’s secret archivist. Unfortunately, he is there mainly for exposition, to shed light on the fickleness of the healing powers and why they appear to come and go.
As original Netflix action movies go, this work ranks below the tense thriller Rebel Ridge (2024). It falls in the more by-the-numbers category of blow-’em-ups like the two Extraction movies (2020 and 2023), mainly due to its failure to breathe life into a story that still feels trapped in the pages of its graphic novel sources.
Hot take: The Old Guard 2 is a workmanlike action sequel that delivers gore and gunfights, but wastes its compelling characters and premise on predictable storytelling.
