What a cursed fantasy agelessness is, one reiterated and reimagined many times since Bram Stoker introduced modern audiences to florid psychosexual vampirism. To be immortally young is to float above the petty ephemera of most people’s short lives, to consider a bigger picture—one both grand and terrifying. There’s an allure to these stories—wouldn’t it be such a freeing joy to know we are eternal?—and also a comfort taken in the undying’s melancholy. Sure, we can’t live like them, but look how sad they are. It’s probably better to have things be the way they are.
I’m always drawn to stories about people who can’t die, who roam the Earth for centuries, weary of the world but somehow still engaged, curious about what may lie around the next corner of time. Which is one reason why so much of the new Netflix action film, The Old Guard (premiering July 10), works well on me. (Warning: some spoilers to follow.) The movie positions its team of almost sorta immortals (they can die eventually, but they tend to heal quickly from even the most surely fatal of injuries) as both avenging angels roaming the world doing justice and ancient sad sacks grown tired with their mission. Well, at least Charlize Theron’s team leader Andy (short for Andromache of Scythia) is a bit over it all, sick of the world’s ceaseless parade of horrors, one that all her butt-kicking over the millennia has done little if anything to stanch.
The Old Guard doesn’t spend too much time dwelling in its existential malaise—mostly because a new team member (played by If Beale Street Could Talk star KiKi Layne) has to be brought into the fold, and a deranged young pharma billionaire (Harry Melling) wants to harvest their blood to cure death (or something). But the film does allow for frequent enough moments of despair and reflection, ones that give what might otherwise just be a mercenary action-adventure a tingle of otherworldly pathos. Credit to director Gina Prince-Bythewood for teasing that out, and to screenwriter Greg Rucka, adapting his own graphic novel. The Old Guard is a naked attempt to kick off a franchise, but I wasn’t bothered by all those obvious table-setting mechanics because what they’re establishing is so tantalizing.
Prince-Bythewood is good with the action stuff as well. There are plenty of bone-crunching fights and John Wick-ian close-up gun battles (the squib work alone in this picture!) to satisfy those simply looking for a visceral surge. These scenes are balletically performed by Theron, whose Atomic Blonde training has not faded from her muscle memory. Layne, so delicate of bearing, can at times seem a bit swallowed up by all this brawn and noise, but her casting is one of the many ways that Prince-Bythewood’s film happily distinguishes itself from so many all-male, all-white action movies.
There’s a point-of-view brought to The Old Guard that, for all its ills, Netflix has been more willing to platform than the traditional studios. For that, despite its blunt pacing and less-than-inspiring visuals (why do so many Netflix films look like they’ve got a cheap filter laid over them?), The Old Guard plays like a victory.
But what really grabbed me about the movie is something that, sure, might slake a particular thirst in me, but also probably will represent something rather large to lots of people. Amidst all the immortal moodiness—actually, in some senses at the center of it—is a romantic relationship between two men, Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli), who met while fighting on opposite sides of the Crusades (they are our true gay elders) and have been in love since. This is not handled with the perfunctory scrap-throwing of Sulu in Star Trek hugging his husband in one shot, or Captain America going to a support group led by a man who talks about dating another man. No, this is a plainly stated and frequently expressed thing, one gloriously punctuated with a poetic monologue followed by a kiss during a brief interruption in the fighting.