The fountain of youth is the affective counterpart to the Midas touch, a greedy fantasy that delivers a built-in punishment—everyone who stays forever young is doomed to bear the death of all of their loved ones. The inescapable solitude of immortality gave rise to one of the greatest modern operas, “The Makropulos Case,” about a three-century-old woman, stuck at age forty-two, who longs to die. (Leoš Janáček completed the opera in 1925; it had its Metropolitan Opera première, a tragic one, only in 1996.) A noteworthy new movie, “The Old Guard,” coming to Netflix this Friday, is a supernatural action drama that’s built on the same premise and derives its emotional power from the pathos of lonely survival. The director, Gina Prince-Bythewood, spotlights the melodramatic poignancy of the tale’s clever premise, yet does so all too briefly and glancingly—because of the film’s rigid genre framework.
The movie, based on a comic-book series by Greg Rucka (who wrote the script) and Leandro Fernández, is centered on a quartet of freelance warriors: Joe (Marwan Kenzari), Nicky (Luca Marinelli), Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), and the leader, Andromache, a.k.a. Andy (Charlize Theron). A dapper and mysterious secret agent named Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) dispatches the four to South Sudan for a life-saving and time-sensitive mission: to rescue a group of child hostages who are being held in a remote compound before their captors disperse them to different hideouts, making rescue unlikely. The mission turns disastrous—the four fighters are riddled with gunfire and left for dead. They don’t die, though. Their wounds spontaneously and quickly heal, and they rise to fight another day. A U.S. marine named Nile Freeman (KiKi Layne), who’s grievously wounded in combat in Afghanistan, also spontaneously heals; Andy kidnaps her and forces her to join the group.
Andy, the senior member, won’t tell her age, but she has seemingly been active since Homeric times. Joe and Nicky, who are a couple, met fighting on opposite sides of the Crusades; Booker is a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars; and flashbacks show the horrific fate of the group’s erstwhile member, Quynh (Van Veronica Ngo), who, around five hundred years ago, was entombed under the sea—and is unable to die, remaining instead awake and alert in eternal isolation and confinement. (“That’s the reason why we dread capture,” one of the men tells Nile.) Another tale of another absent member casts yet another shadow on these warriors’ burdensome powers. These elements of backstory, disclosed to Nile as part of her initiation, are amplified by tales of love and loss—of spouses and children aging and dying, of being unable to disclose the truth to friends who wouldn’t in any case believe it. The premise and its emotional complexities offer ample and moving material to whip up, calmly but fervently, into powerful evocations of centuries and millennia, of existential terror, of agony endured for the sake of a higher principle.
But it never happens. Instead, the accursed bonds of genre prevent these fascinating and moving ideas from being developed; they’re only glancingly suggested. Genre forces the movie to instrumentalize them, to deliver them as a mere pretext for fight scenes and a humanizing adornment to the relentless and impersonal mechanism of the plot. What’s made clear (if too plain) from the start is that this band of warriors, the old guard of the title, chooses its battles; if the rescue mission in South Sudan is one that plays unimpeachably to likely viewers, there may have been other, more dubious battles in their past. Upon meeting the three men, Nile asks whether they’re “good guys or bad guys.” Joe responds, “Depends on the century.” (Nicky adds, even more ambiguously, “We fight for what we think is right.”) Their centuries of life have brought them centuries’ worth of experience, even of perspective; what they’ve seen, what they know, how they learn languages, their view of the world and its history—it’s all a movie in itself. (It would be fascinating to hear Nile’s political discussions with the serious battlefield versions of the 2000 Year Old Man.)
Instead, the group is being set up: a greedy young pharmaceuticals mogul named Steven Merrick (Harry Melling) kidnaps all of them but Nile, in order to extract their DNA and distill their regenerative trait into a marketable therapy. Tracing them to Merrick’s London skyscraper, Nile makes it her mission to free them. The results are even more shootouts-by-number, more whirlingly overchoreographed fight scenes with a variety of weapons and familiarly acrobatic hand-to-hand combat, all amped up with blaring and thudding music by the yard. Not only do their wounds heal quickly; their clothing is seemingly stained beyond the hope of Tide, but they appear to have an endless supply of fresh garments stashed handily somewhere. They travel internationally, but there’s never a question about their official identities; they leave trails of carnage in very public places but never encounter media, police, or officials.
The script is no more troubled with the characters’ outer practicalities than with their inner lives, which count only to the extent that it advances the action. (For instance, the warriors dream of each other, but only until they meet.) Each of the characters gets an index card’s worth of traits and no more. (For instance, Nile was raised on the South Side of Chicago, and her father died in combat when she was a child.) The exposition—defining the supernatural traits of the group along with their practical functions, displaying their connection to Copley, placing Nile in harm’s way in Afghanistan, and folding her into the group—occurs at a plodding pace of home-viewing distraction, as if to allow viewers to multitask without missing a beat. The trade-off is disheartening: there’s scant sense of dramatic freedom or of wide-ranging attention to the varied imaginative implications of the material. In “Love & Basketball,” Prince-Bythewood’s first feature, which she wrote and directed, she displayed both a passionate yet delicate dramatic sensibility and an inventive way with action—it includes one of the most distinctive sports sequences ever filmed. That film is also centered on the passing of time and its emotional power—and Prince-Bythewood crafted an unusual dramatic structure to heighten it. The tight formatting of “The Old Guard” leaves little room for such originality or personality.
