Main cast: Charlize Theron (Andromache of Scythia), KiKi Layne (Nile Freeman), Matthias Schoenaerts (Sebastian Le Livre), Marwan Kenzari (Yusuf Al-Kaysani), Luca Marinelli (Nicolò di Genova), Veronica Ngô (Quỳnh), Henry Golding (Hang Tuah), Uma Thurman (Discord), and Chiwetel Ejiofor (James Copley)
Director: Victoria Mahoney
Excuse me, but what is Hang Tuah doing here? By the logic of Hollywood progressive ideology, Hang Tuah was a Malay warrior from Malacca, so he should be played by a Malaysian Malay actor, not Henry Golding as the man is half-English and half-Dayak! Not only does he not have a single drop of Malay blood in him, but he was also even born in the wrong state!
Is this where I rage on TikTok and demand restitution on behalf of the offended people of Malacca?
On a more serious note, in many ways, The Old Guard and now the sequel The Old Guard 2 are still a decent antidote to the painfully formulaic superhero movies out there, but this one is nowhere as enjoyable as the previous movie.
One of the main reasons is that the plot is pretty meh. In the last movie, Booker or Sebastian Le Livre was exiled and Quỳnh was somehow freed. In this movie, one learns that Quỳnh was released by the first ever immortal, Discord.
Discord wants to manipulate her to avenge herself on Andromache or Andy and her friends for having abandoned Quỳnh to 500 years of painful cycle of death and rebirth in an iron maiden at the bottom of the sea.
In the meantime, Andy is now mortal in the sense that she can be killed, but don’t worry. Nile discovers that she is a walking immortality musical chair, who can rob immortals of their immortality and… somehow those mortal-ized immortals can also bestow their supposedly lost immortality to other mortal-ized immortals? What?
Oh, my head hurts.
Anyway, basically, this whole movie is an excuse to let some new characters show up and don’t really add much to the plot. Actually, Gay Immortals One and Two also don’t actually add much to the plot, now that I think of it. At least they’ve stopped acting like clockwork talking devices that express their love for one another in every scene they are in this time around, I guess.
The entire movie is actually about Quỳnh and Andy reuniting again, their past issues apparently smoothened over that easily by the power of girlboss squared or something. This relationship is supposed to drive the movie, so the fact that it is so shallow makes the whole thing anticlimactic after all the build-up in the previous film.
Oh, and the only character that isn’t one-dimensional… well, let’s just say that Booker gets a very predictable send-off. So, from now the entire cast will be filled with one-note stereotypes, how awesome.
Also, for the most part, this movie doesn’t have much action — just the main characters moping and wandering around from one place to another. Occasionally, they fight with Nile to play the transfer-the-immortality game but for the most part, it’s moping across various locations on the globe. Is it because action scenes are getting more expensive to film?
This movie ends in a cliffhanger, mind you, and at the time of writing there doesn’t seem to be any sequel greenlit by Netflix. This, coupled to the slow and draggy pacing of the entire film, suggests to me that the movie exists merely as a filler between the previous movie and the next one, with everything dragged out to fill the screentime so that they don’t run out of plot for the next film. The whole thing feels pointless, even a waste of time, as a result.
All in all, people that enjoy the previous movie should lower their expectations coming into this one. It’s slow, draggy, boring, with the extra bonus of making the only character with any semblance of character complexity making a predictable exit. The next movie has better have a solid script to turn things around!
