Review: The Old Guard
Netflix’s hit movie formula has worked well for them so far. It goes something like this: notable celebrity + action movie + Netflix subscription = success. In this case the notable celebrity is Charlize Theron and the action movie is The Old Guard. And you guessed it, it’s the newest mega production to hit Netflix. The streamer has created similar formulas with Extraction (Chris Hemsworth) and Triple Frontier (Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac) with mixed success (an increasingly tricky thing to measure when we don’t have box office numbers to reference).
These films, which might fall in a summer blockbuster or popcorn movie category, now ambiguously land in a Netflix Top 10 slider when you’re browsing the heaps of content at your fingertips. That’s not to say The Old Guard doesn’t have some emotional heft to it. The story is based on a graphic novel following a group of immortals who have been quietly saving the world behind the scenes from the most potentially disastrous villains and disasters.
The immortals truly wrestle through the implications of a life that has no end and what they owe to each other and the world at large as the only beings with these powers. Theron gives a truly impressive performance further solidifying her presence in the action space. With her turn as Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road and 2017s Atomic Blonde, I hope we can expect more action roles for her. She just rocks.
It’s hard to get that same adrenaline pumping rush you’d enjoy when you see a movie like The Old Guard on the big screen, but there are enough interesting story beats, character building moments and a stellar Charlize Theron performance to make for an acceptable substitute for a Friday night at a movie theater.