- UK release: July 2020 (Netflix)
- Director: Gina Prince-Bythewood · Writer: Greg Rucka
- Studio / distributor: Skydance Media; Denver and Delilah; Netflix
- Genre: Supernatural action thriller / comic-book adventure · Runtime: 125 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Charlize Theron (Mad Max: Fury Road, Atomic Blonde) as Andy; KiKi Layne (If Beale Street Could Talk) as Nile Freeman; Matthias Schoenaerts (Rust and Bone) as Booker; Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave) as Copley
- IMDb: 7.2 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 80% critics / 71% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Netflix has spent the past couple of years throwing money at the action film, and the results have mostly looked like money: glossy, weightless, designed to play in the background while you check your phone. The Old Guard is the one that breaks the pattern. It comes from a comic by Greg Rucka, who also writes the script, it is directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, better known for Love & Basketball than for gunfights, and it gives Charlize Theron her best action role since she went toe to toe with a stairwell full of men in Atomic Blonde. The premise is daft on paper. What the film does with it is not.
The setup
Andy, short for Andromache of Scythia, has been alive for several thousand years, and she is tired. She leads a small team of immortal warriors who heal from any wound and who have spent centuries quietly intervening in human history, hiring themselves out where they think they can do some good. When a job in South Sudan turns out to be bait, their existence is exposed to people who would very much like to take them apart and find out how they work. At the same moment, on the other side of the world, a young US Marine named Nile Freeman has her throat cut and wakes up without a scratch, which means the old guard has just become five. The hook is simple and it lands: what does it cost to be unkillable, and how long before you stop wanting to be.
The cast
Theron carries the film, and she carries it on weariness as much as on violence. Andy is not a quippy superhero; she is someone who has buried everyone she ever loved and is starting to suspect the work was never worth it, and Theron plays that exhaustion without ever letting the character go soft. KiKi Layne, fresh from the very different register of If Beale Street Could Talk, is the audience’s way in as Nile, all disbelief and resistance hardening into resolve. Matthias Schoenaerts gives Booker a hangdog melancholy that the script quietly needs, and Marwan Kenzari and Luca Marinelli, as the centuries-old couple Joe and Nicky, get the film’s best scene without throwing a single punch in it. Chiwetel Ejiofor lends the plot machinery more gravity than it strictly deserves. The team feels like people who have actually spent lifetimes in each other’s company, which is most of what a film like this needs to work.
The craft
Prince-Bythewood shoots action you can follow, which should not feel like a compliment in 2020 and somehow still does. The set pieces are built around bodies that keep getting up, and she finds the grim comedy and the horror in that without leaning on either. There is real geography to the fights, a sense of where everyone is and what they are trying to do, and the violence has weight because the camera holds still long enough to let it. The film is more interested in its people in the gaps between the action than most of its rivals, and the pacing only really sags in the middle, where the plot stops to explain itself. Dustin O’Halloran and Volker Bertelmann’s score, threaded with needle-drops, gives it a pulse. It looks like a film made by someone who cares, not by an algorithm filling a content slot.
How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is Highlander, immortals trudging through history carrying their swords and their grief, and The Old Guard has more in common with that film’s melancholy than with its camp. It sits in the same recent lineage as John Wick and Theron’s own Atomic Blonde, the wave of action films that decided choreography and consequence were worth taking seriously again, and it is a clear cut above Netflix’s own Extraction from earlier this year, which had the spectacle but none of the interior life. Where it parts company with all of them is the source: this is a comic-book adaptation that remembers comics can be about loneliness and duty, not just powers and punch-ups.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are broadly won over, sitting around 80%, and the praise lands where you would expect: Theron, the action, and the unusual warmth between the team. The reservations are fair too. The villain, a smirking pharma heir, is the weakest thing in the film, and the last act tips its hand toward the sequel it plainly wants to be rather than finishing its own story. Audiences are a touch cooler at 71%, which I suspect is the price of a film that spends as much time on feeling as on fighting when some viewers turned up purely for the fighting. I land closer to the critics, and a little above them.
Verdict
This is the rare streaming action film I would happily watch again, and rewatchability is most of what I am marking it on. It takes a silly premise seriously, it is anchored by a genuinely good Theron performance, the team has chemistry you believe in, and it is directed with a craft and a patience the genre has largely forgotten. It is not flawless. The plot is familiar, the villain is thin, and it ends on a hook rather than a resolution. But it is made with care, it has more on its mind than its body count, and it earns the sequel it is angling for. 8⁄10.
Availability: Streaming on Netflix now, worldwide, from 10 July.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the sequel the ending so plainly set up, The Old Guard 2, eventually arrived in 2025, and the long gap between the two did the franchise no favours. The first film has held up as the high point and as the strongest of Netflix’s home-grown action efforts of its era, the one people still recommend when the subject comes up. It remains on Netflix.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for injury detail, language, violence. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The BBFC release page for The Old Guard carries the classification (15) and the short consumer advice line quoted above, but its detailed per-category Content Advice (the broken-down Violence, Language and Injury detail notes) was not available to retrieve at the time of writing. The summary descriptors classify the film for strong violence, strong language, and injury detail.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
