The Old Guard (2020)

You waited long enough. Why Now?  What? This thing only dropped on Netflix 16 days ago. I know most people these days only seem to have very limited attention-spans, but this impatience for reviews of new content is getting a bit nuts. I was 41 years ‘late’ with my review of Play Misty For Me yesterday; I figure 16 days is bang-up-to-the-moment of whatever cultural zeitgeist Netflix is. Unless The Old Guard really is distant history already. I can’t keep up, frankly.

So whats it about, then? Ah, well, to go into any detail on this threatens some spoilers, although I have to wonder if I’m spoiling anything when the film’s trailer/teaser pretty much does it anyway. About fifteen or so minutes in, there’s a ‘twist’ or event that lays out the central premise of the film and… well, if someone went into the film blind they’d be gifted a genuine surprise, and as such things are bloody rare in film etc these days, I’ll make this effort to assist it (we’ll add a Spoiler section down the bottom? Okay then I’ll see you down there). Basically, its about Charlize Theron and her team of heroes shooting the shit out of bad guys.

Any good? You know, I thought it was- Charlize Theron is beautiful and a great actress and she can really do these physical movies very well. I remember first seeing her in the Mighty Joe Young remake back in the R1 DVD-import days, in 1998/1999. She’s come a long way since then. The fact that she was so wasted in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus is a constant bucket of ice-cold water down my pants. The Old Guard‘s action sequences are great, not terribly over-the-top or frenetically edited with shakycam, the cast is great, the story genuinely interesting with a few surprises and tantalising possibilities. The bad guy probably isn’t all he could have been, but the teaser at the end of the film hints that a sequel won’t have that particular problem.

So worth waiting for? What? It came out on July 10th, we already went over this (calm down ghost). I will just say this- in this era of Covid 19-induced lockdowns and cinemas closed for months everywhere (and film releases getting delays upon delays, to the point I’m actually getting concerned for Villeneuve’s Dune in December) its a strange sign of the times that a film like The Old Guard with a cast such as it has, with a budget of some $70 million and international shooting locations, can be made/purchased by Netflix and just casually dropped onto the service, into people’s homes ostensibly ‘free’.  Of course many people will be rushing back to cinemas when they reopen, but one has top wonder if this pandemic has been a huge opportunity for platforms like Netflix and Amazon to push the entertainment history further towards the inevitable streaming future.

Worthless observation? Well I might have already made such an observation in the paragraph above, but as usual of late this is another film based on a comic or graphic novel, so inevitably is a little immature and aimed clearly at a teenage/young audience. Which is fine, its a little disguised but it is clearly a superhero movie (see spoilers below), so one gets used to making allowances, you know? The Old Guard is a fun action film with a neat premise, its just such a shame that novel premises seem to be the domain of comic adaptations these days, and that film producers don’t look at actual old-fashioned books for ideas. There’s plenty of great science-fiction books from the past twenty years that would make for great science-fiction movies, for instance, and I’m sure authors are still writing great westerns etc.

(And a final warning!) Go on then, where be the Spoilers? They are IMMORTALS! There is a great scene early on when the team goes into a stockade in Sudan to free some abducted schoolchildren and it turns out to be a trap and the team are massacred. But then after a few moments they get back up and wreak bloody revenge on their ‘murderers’. Its a good scene that has lost much of its impact simply because the trailer gives the premise away, but, you know, that’s… tricky, I mean how else do you sell this movie? Seems to me that the graphic novel series is clearly indebted to Jack Kirby’s The Eternals from the mid-seventies (one of my favourite comics, can’t wait for the Omnibus later this year – although that is likely to slip to 2021, I suppose, damn you Covid 19) and that this film possibly steals a little thunder from Disney’s movie adaptation.