A Review of “The Old Guard (2020)”

 

With more movies constantly being delayed because of the Coronavirus, the only new movies appearing seems to be streaming service movies. The Old Guard is an American superhero (sort of) movie based on the comic book of the same name. It is directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood who I’ll be honest I am not familiar with and also written by Greg Rucka who wrote the comic book. I was very interested in watching this movie after seeing the first trailer as the premise of immortal badasses sounds very interesting. Plus it has Charlize Theron who is awesome and Chiwetel Ejiofor who has always been great in my opinion.

First things I will praise is the main heroes cast. Charlize is still pretty badass as “Andy” and very convincingly so. The new recruit “Nile Freeman” played by KiKi Layne gives a great performance as a sort of POV character for the viewer. The supporting cast is also pretty good with Matthias Schoenaerts as “Booker” giving a very conflicting emotion to being an immortal, Marwan Kenzari as “Joe” who gives a very memorable speech while being very romantic and Luca Marinelli as “Nicky” who is quite the witty guy. Every single one of them is quite charming and from their performance alone can give the audience a sense of their personality. Most of the actors are also great in these action scenes and it is very obvious that these actors threw themselves into practising these action scenes themselves.

The villains in this movie, however, is something I am quite mixed about. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays one of the villain “James Copley” who is meant to be more sympathetic and there is a great emotional performance from him in the third act, comes out as very predictable and plain. Harry Melling from Harry Potter fame as “Steven Merrick” who is the main villain for the second half comes out as over the top and cartooney which contrasts massively with the others who are more grounded and believable.

The action scenes are very clearly inspired by John Wick and are pretty cool to watch albeit they don’t do anything new with it. They are filmed a bit weird with a lot of zooms and sometimes random shaky cam although the shakiness isn’t Jason Bourne bad and are still visible. My problem is the lack of action scenes. There are not a lot which is kind of disappointing and the trailer pretty much showed all the action scenes in the movie.

The premise with the immortals which is one of the reasons why I wanted to watch the movie is generally pretty good and utilised mostly effectively but no character ever loses a limb which is a shame considering you have immortal characters. The rules of their immortality is a bit iffy and not completely explained which kind of irks me a bit and feels a little bit lazy.

The story is something I am also a bit mixed about. The first half of the movie with it about training a new immortal “Nile” is really enjoyable. Seeing the conflict between long time immortal “Andy” and new immortal was great and seeing their different opinions about life was interesting. The emotional moments in the movie are great as well. Seeing “Nile” clash with the fact that she can’t even die or age and realising she might not ever see her family again was saddening. “Andy” and “Booker” talking about their heart-wrenching past with flashbacks to help illustrate it as well is genuinely great stuff. As I stated before but “James Copley” gives a believable explanation to his motive that is very sympathetic. If this movie did anything right then it was these emotional moments and fleshing out the characters. However, the second half of this movie feels like a cliche of superhero movies and turns this movie into feeling generic. They now have to take down over the top bad guy dude from Harry Potter and this is where the story takes a large dip for me. 

My final criticism with the movie has got to be the soundtrack. It sucks. The soundtrack contains a lot of pop songs which kind of took me out of the movie as it tends to contrast with the scene that was happening right now. For example, they play a pop song to build up an action scene and it just feels dumb.

Overall, despite my fair amount of criticism, the movie is okay. It doesn’t do anything revolutionary or make me come out of it feeling something or thinking about something but I did still have a good time. The movie premise had great ideas but might have worked a lot better as a TV show in my opinion. Still, it does end with the blatant sequel tease and despite it all, I would be interested in watching a sequel.