{"id":32105,"date":"2025-07-02T08:19:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-02T08:19:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/32105\/"},"modified":"2025-07-02T08:19:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-02T08:19:09","slug":"charlize-theron-leads-another-lesser-battle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/32105\/","title":{"rendered":"Charlize Theron Leads Another, Lesser Battle"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t\u201cThe Old Guard 2<\/a>\u201d opens with one of those \u201cextravagant\u201d violent preludes \u2014 in this case, the lit-like-a-Swiffer-commercial Netflix version \u2014\u00a0that\u2019s trying to be like something out of an old James Bond movie: a sequence in which the over-the-top quality is linked to how little we\u2019re told about what\u2019s actually going on. Andy (Charlize Theron<\/a>), in sunglasses and dark hair, is leading her team \u00ad\u2014 I call them the I-Team, because they\u2019re immortal and kick ass \u2014 as they infiltrate a villa swarming with guards, who they dispatch in one-on-one confrontations, mostly by stabbing them to death. They\u2019re trying to get to some Mr. Big, who turns out to be an anonymous dude in red silk pajamas who gets destroyed like everyone else. This showy yet meaningless appetizer of a sequence is Bondian in theory, but as soon as Andy and her team return to their headquarters, plotting whatever comes next, the mood starts to veer closer to that of a \u201cFast and Furious\u201d movie. Except that \u201cThe Old Guard 2\u201d doesn\u2019t have that \u201cFast and the Furious\u201d energy. It\u2019s more like \u201cThe Languid and the Bothered.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFive years ago this week, \u201cThe Old Guard\u201d<\/a> was released on Netflix, and I confess that it\u2019s not exactly a movie that has stayed with me. Yet as directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, it had more get-up-and-go than this logy, morose, overly self-important and solemnly \u201cmeditative\u201d second chapter. Prince-Bythewood didn\u2019t return for the sequel. The new director is Victoria Mahoney, who doesn\u2019t quite seem to realize that she\u2019s making \u201cThe Expendables Pt. 9\u201d with self-healing limbs. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Old Guard 2,\u201d now that it\u2019s officially holding down the center of a franchise, takes the \u201cOld Guard\u201d mythology inordinately seriously. It wouldn\u2019t be the first movie based on a graphic novel to do so. Greg Rucka, the writer of the \u201cOld Guard\u201d graphic novel series, co-wrote the script of \u201cThe Old Guard 2\u201d (with Sarah L. Walker) and is one of the film\u2019s executive producers, and he obviously wants us to feel immersed in the high drama of these immortals, the drama being that they live forever\u2026until they don\u2019t. They can wake up on any given day and learn that their immortality is gone.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s what happened to Andy midway through the first film, and now, as she copes with her vulnerable new status, she\u2019s besieged by figures from her past \u2014 like Quynh (Veronica Van), the fierce warrior she fought alongside for 1,500 years, until Quynh was found guilty of witchcraft and locked in an iron maiden and dropped to the bottom of the sea. (That kind of chilled the friendship.) Quynh is now seeking vengeance on Andy and the world, a quest that has allied her with a new character named Discord, who also comes from the past but is played by Uma Thurman with a corporate hauteur that doesn\u2019t exactly make her seem like someone who came up through the Middle Ages.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s a good extended shot where Andy strolls through a passageway in Rome, walking by people from her past as the place slowly turns back in time. We\u2019re supposed to be seeing her memories, and there should have been more of that. But for all the talk of centuries gone by, \u201cThe Old Guard 2\u201d feels like a time-tripping action fantasy made on the cheap. The issue of who\u2019s immortal or not, and how you can turn immortal (or have that ability taken away), starts to seem part of some arbitrary movie game, like \u201cWho\u2019s got the detonator?\u201d And the actors, trapped in what is too often an empty somber talkfest, seem stranded in a way that they weren\u2019t in the first film.<\/p>\n

\n\tTheron is physically commanding, and when Andy and Quynh face off in an alleyway the movie briefly comes alive. But the comic-book soap opera of their ruptured bond is too abstract to take hold. KiKi Layne\u2019s Nile still has her cleansing fierceness, Henry Golding plays a new immortal, Tuah, who isn\u2019t given enough to do, while Matthias Schoenaerts, as the beleaguered Booker (who sold the group out and now wants back in), gets a little too hangdoggy. Chiwetel Ejiofor, as Copley the CIA agent turned I-Team ally, lends his crisp panache to lines like \u201cIt would be ill-advised to discharge any firearm in the vicinity of the core.\u201d The core, in this case, refers to a Chinese nuclear reactor, hidden in Indonesia, that Discord has threatened to blow up. It\u2019s all part of her stab at immortality, but by the end of \u201cThe Old Guard 2\u201d it\u2019s mostly the clich\u00e9s that seem to be living forever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Old Guard 2\u201d opens with one of those \u201cextravagant\u201d violent preludes \u2014 in this case, the lit-like-a-Swiffer-commercial…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":32106,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[18981,171,53,18982,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-32105","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-charlize-theron","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-movies","11":"tag-the-old-guard-2","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114782664374521505","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32105\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}