There’s one thing you can always count on in blockbuster movie culture: if a popcorn genre stays around long enough, after a while it will merge with other genre of popcorn with which it apparently has nothing to do. That’s what happened when “Kingsman: Secret Service” (2014) fused the setting and attitude of a James Bond thriller with the bang-bang-ballet-in-the-air action fantasy of a superhero movie.
It happens again in “The old guard”. Adapted from the 2017 graphic novel by Greg Rucka (who wrote the script), the film is about a team of crime-fighting immortals whose flesh can repair itself with gunshot wounds and knife stabs like something straight out of a “X-Men” movie. But they’re also a group of renegades in leather jackets who find a way to deal maximum damage with machine guns and movements that break the windpipe like something out of a Jason Statham recovery special. You could call them The I-Team (I for “immortal”). You could also call the movie “X-Men: The Expendables Edition”.
The leader of this group of eternal commandos is Andromache de Scythia, known as Andy (Charlize Theron), whom we know in Morocco, where he is wearing Ray-Bans and a black T-shirt and a dark brown version of a late ending. -70 years David Bowie coif. He looks like a refugee from a motorcycle commercial, which makes you think the film will be a complicated exercise in incredibly abstract action iconography. But “The old guard”, in any case, goes in the opposite direction; It’s like an immortal-mercenary reunion movie. The fragments of the image are logical and formulated (it lasts for two hours), but the director, Gina Prince-Bythewood (doing a big lane change after “Love & Basketball” and “The Secret Life of Bees”), organizes He fights scenes with mature executive finesse, and she reveals a certain poignant quality in her cast.
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According to the movie’s invincibility theology, each member of the crew was killed at a certain point in history, only to wake up and learn that from that point on they would be immortal. Andy is the eldest, he can’t even remember how long he’s been in this, and Theron, as fiercely as you want him to be (especially when wielding a medieval Asian circular-cut weapon), acts like someone who is tired of bones. after a millennium or two of fighting evil; The dream of immortality has become his cross. Matthias Schoenaerts plays Booker, who was killed fighting for Napoleon, as a melancholic loner who spins through history. And Marwan Kenzari and Luca Marinelli are Joe and Nicky, a dark duo who died during a duel in the Crusades and have been lovers throughout the centuries. That’s part of the film’s extremely inclusive approach to the action genre.
The other part is KiKi Layne’s role as Nile, a marine whose throat is cut by a Taliban leader during the war in Afghanistan. A day later, she is doing better, marking her as the first new member of the I-Team since 1812. Layne’s performance is the most resonant in the film. He plays Nile as a dishonest, desperate, and human-sized person who is clearly insensitive about joining his new warrior colleagues in a life that never ends. She’s not so into the show, and that gives her the moment she agrees to take over the actual drama.
“The Old Guard” is both a conventional action thriller; an origin story that is trying, in its utilitarian form of Netflix, to launch a brutal franchise; and a late “elegiac” episode from that same franchise. It is a genre film that, in any case, takes its characters much more seriously than the audience. Floating through the years with hidden identities, Andy and his team present themselves to us as stealthy saviors who really, really care. Explaining the game of immortality to Nile, Andy says things like: “It’s not what steals time. It’s what it leaves behind. (A line like that can leave behind the pulse of a movie).
As “The Old Guard” works, immortality lasts until it doesn’t. The film has a plot to pass the baton to a representative of the new world that echoes “Terminator: Dark Fate” and “Logan”. The villain, Merrick, runs a pharmaceutical corporation and is portrayed by Harry Melling (from the “Harry Potter” movies) as if he were Malcolm McLaren’s evil grandson. His plan is to kidnap our heroes and learn the secrets of immortality by extracting their flesh for their genetic secrets. Merrick’s middleman, Copley, is played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, an actor who never ceases to amaze. Here, he goes from being a villain to a soul-tormented collaborator, to the movie equivalent of a certain character with an eye patch in a completely convincing way, even when he barely moves a facial muscle. Will “The Old Guard” be successful enough to generate a sequel? If so, the challenge in the future will be to make the prospect of immortality seem like more than a repeat.
