The Old Guard
Gina Prince-Bythewood (Love & Basketball; Beyond the Lights) makes a clunky transition to action filmmaking in The Old Guard, a comic book adaptation that struggles in its journey from the page to the screen, even with its co-creator in tow.
Despite series scribe Greg Rucka on writing duty, the tale of immortal warriors working as modern-day mercenaries for good suffers under filmmakers unsure how to enact exciting battle sequences and wastes the talents of a gifted ensemble in the process.
Little thought is put into capturing the expert skills of Andy (Charlize Theron), Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), Joe (Marwan Kenzari, Jafar from the live-action Aladdin catastrophe), and Nicky (Luca Marinelli, The Great Beauty) as they dispatch faceless armed baddies — a theme that sadly remains consistent throughout the film.
The fight sequences are shot from a baffling, unexciting distance and fail to employ thrilling edits or camera angles, lingering far away like a fan filming a crucial sports play on a smartphone from the nosebleed seats. The lone benefit of this “approach” is an assurance that the stars are indeed doing the fighting — which is great, but after Atomic Blonde, if that’s a stunt double instead of Theron, it would be disappointing regardless.
Formerly reliable on the visual front, Prince-Bythewood continues this wonkiness in non-action scenes, employing handheld camerawork on her cast and framing them in non-meaningful ways, though Second Unit drone shots during transitions add some welcome slickness.
This lack of technical care is oddly in line with Rucka’s script, a familiar "person new to powers learns from a veteran" story with KiKi Layne (so good in If Beale Street Could Talk) doing what she can with the poorly-written part of a U.S. Marine named Nile under Andy’s tough-love tutelage.
Whatever intriguing mystery of the heroes’ long history, as well as the unpredictability of when their individual immortality will end, is largely undone by the soon obvious reason for Nile’s emergence — which, if you don’t guess it, will be explained in full by a character before too long.
Toss in Harry “Dudley Dursley” Melling as a dull Big Pharma villain who wants the team for profit’s sake, a sadly underused Chiwetel Ejiofor as his ex-CIA colleague, and a double-cross that can be spotted from 2015, and The Old Guard isn’t just visually shoddy — it’s a borderline shocking mess all around.
Grade: C-minus. Rated R. Available to stream via Netflix
(Photo: Netflix)
