The old guard prepares for action.
Netflix
You don’t need to have read the comic book that the new Netflix action movie The Old Guard is based on. Just watch the first five minutes and you will know literally everything that is going to happen.
Starring Charlize Theron in Fury Road mode, The Old Guard airs on Netflix on July 10. It opens with an elite team of assassins recruited by the CIA to sneak into a foreign militia complex. – Walk along the walls with your assault rifles jammed against your faces and then turn around the corners. They shoot a boy and then lower their body to the ground while frowning in the dark. Yes, The Old Guard is assembled from the oldest action cliches and spy movies.
The gray-haired leader goes against his own rules for one last job. Men with beards and sunglasses stroll through African markets saying things like “Local yesterday afternoon” and “Last confirmed personal flyby on site.” The Hummers cross the desert at full speed, then head to London, where a hooded CEO goes straight from a press conference to bark “Find them!” mercenaries in a glass hallway. People in armor frown, a lot. An obvious traitor is obvious.
If you’re being charitable, you could argue that writer Greg Rucka is subverting action movie tropes in a script adapted from his own comic (co-created by artist Leandro Fernández). Because there is a great whirl of fantasy: globetrotting mercenaries have swords. Because they are fucking immortal.
You only know that one of these people is about to say “Sure”.
Netflix
The problem is that The Old Guard’s twist doesn’t really twist the action. Stabbing and pirouetting, Theron’s tough bulletproof isn’t really any different from John wick or your own fancy killer in Atomic blonde. Identikit evil CEO could be pulled straight out of Poison or Bloodshot. The action is clever and fast, but you’ve seen it a million times before. How can something with so much CGI blood splatter be so bled? Are we really supposed to get excited about an invincible hero wading through another multitude of faceless specialists with tactical gear?
I know, I know, it’s silly B movie entertainment. But the real crime is that this is one of those movies where the back story is sooo much more interesting than what’s on screen. Brief flashbacks and passing mentions hint at a story of witches in iron coffins and a pair of rival crusaders killing each other until they fall in love. That sounds amazing.
KiKi Layne lights the eternal flame.
Netflix
To be fair, The Old Guard tries to deliver an emotional punch amid the hackneyed action. After another rotating gun fu sequence leaves the dead SWAT guys lying on the ground, director Gina Prince-Bythewood keeps the camera to Theron’s face as he gazes at the endless horror of his long life. Each of the timeless heroes faces the pain of immortality in their own way, and the diversity of the group and their experience is moving. This leads to the most genuinely emotional moment in the film, as Marwan Kenzari delivers a speech so sincere that it almost alone elevates the film above others of its kind.
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The emotional dilemma of eternity worries the last recruit in the ranks, played by KiKi Layne. Layne’s character provides one of the few intriguing and surprising moments in the film when Theron hands him a gun. Obviously, every movie has a time when script writing software inserts a quarrel between heroes, which will be the “reject the call” part of the classic hero’s journey, but overall the reluctant recruit comes to embrace redemptive violence. in the end . Here, for an intriguing moment, it seems that our hero rejects the violent path, choosing to leave the action movie as a concept. Now that It would be a great subversion.
Obviously it doesn’t last. We’ll be back in business soon as usual, double-tapping men in balaclavas and giving speeches about the sanctity of life while, at the same time, casually massacring dozens of people at random.
Yes, you know the exercise. The old guard is a little funny. But above all it is the same as always.
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