The Old Guard (2020)

Directed by: Gina Prince-Bythewood, based on the graphic novel by Greg Rucka
Starring: Charlize Theron, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Dudley freaking Dursley, and Kiki Layne

This feels like a film I would’ve rented when I was nine not knowing what it was, and then thought was great ‘cause I didn’t have any frame of reference for good action films. It feels average; okay action, all right drama, and it kiiind of explores the premise in an interesting way. I’d recommend it if you’re a Charlize Theron fan and don’t mind seeing some violence, but outside of that it’s not really appealing.

Premise - a squad of immortal warriors in the modern day find themselves under attack at the same time a new initiate for their order is discovered. They struggle to defeat their attackers while saving their newest family member, and potentially facing their own deaths.

Charlize Theron is decently charismatic. The rest of the cast is decently written. Action movies tend to either overdo the violence, underwrite the characters, or badly write the plot, but this managed to balance everything to the point where it feels like a legitimate story, instead of an excuse for stuntmen to beat each other up a few times. It’s violent, but it doesn’t revel in it like a lot of action films do. It’s dramatic, but it doesn’t wallow in the sadness like other dramas do, and it explores some historical questions, but not the way historical films usually do.

Dudley Dursley (Harry Melling) plays an evil big pharma exec in this, intent on exploiting the squad’s immortality 

I guess there’s power in being inoffensive, because apparently this is one of Netflix’s bigger successes and is probably going to get a sequel. That would be nice, because exploring the question of immortal life is one that comics (and I suppose film) have done a number of times to interesting results. The biggest issue of course being, that if you go back even a hundred years, the standards of the time are pretty different, so if you have guys that are THOUSANDS of years old, they’ve probably done some shady stuff. It ties into questions of moral absolutism and how we judge different eras, which I think is a genuinely fascinating question in a time when we’re redefining what is or isn’t okay so rapidly.

Overall, this is okay. I liked it better than some other action films of the same caliber, and I enjoyed the indie roots it clearly has in its graphic novel source material. If we could get more adaptations of graphic novels, we'd all love it.