The old guard
Cast: Charlize Theron, Chiwetel Ejiofor, KiKi Layne, Matthias Schoenaerts, Marwan Kenzari, Luca Marinelli, Harry Melling
Director: Gina Prince-Bythewood
The Charlize Theron starrer, The Old Guard, just out on Netflix, plays like a conventional thriller. It’s kind of a Bond female adventure with flaming guns and swinging machetes and has two very important messages. One implies humanity’s drive towards immortality. Haven’t we seen the run for anti-wrinkle creams and anti-aging pills. The other, connected to the first, is quite overt. The greed of pharmaceutical companies to make a profit at all costs. And this includes torturing men to find out why they have lived so long, and this is at the heart of the film’s plot. So it would be unfair to dismiss The Old Guard as another superhero thing.
Adapted from the 2017 graphic novel by Greg Rucka (who also wrote the screenplay), The Old Guard puts us in touch with a team of crime and injustice fighters, who live hundreds of years and whose bodies can repair themselves from any wound (from bullets , knives, etc.). These ageless guys are led by Andromache of Scythia, aka Andy, played with excellent grit and finesse by Charlize Theron. We are told that every member has been “killed” at some point in history, but they just wake up and walk away. At this point, they learn that they will not die, and Andy, the eldest, does not even know how many centuries she has lived. Some in the team died during the Crusade, some in Napoleonic Wars.
As the first scenes come into view we see Andy and her warriors – Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli) assigned by James Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor with every expression loaded to say something) to rescue young girls held hostage by militias in South Sudan. But when Andy and her team reach the place, they discover they’ve been set up. Though they escape – with bullets falling from their bodies and the deepest wounds magically healed – they are not so lucky later on.
Merrick (Harry Melling), the villain of peace, runs a pharmaceutical company and is determined to find out why Andy and her compatriots live forever. He comes to them, imprisoned them and in what appears to be pure torture, extracts DNA samples from them. Kiki Layne, who claims Nile is a US Marine in Afghanistan and when she recovers from a throat cut, she becomes the newest member of Andy’s brigade. And in the end, though gruff and bitter about a life that will never end, she turns out to be a savior.
The old guard is a fantasy, which may seem very unreal, even mystical, but on the surface one can find much relevance to a world consistently trying to prolong human life with pharmaceutical companies relentlessly trying to take advantage of this vulnerability. They can be villains, as the film highlights, making unnecessarily huge profits while pretending to play noble Samaritans. Merrick says, imagine the benefits humanity will enjoy and the money we can roll. Torturing Andy and her fighters seems like a small price to pay for him. Ethics be damned!
Rating: 3/5