THE OLD GUARD 2 - Mark Reviews Movies

The Old Guard 2, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 2, 2025

In The Old Guard, the immortality of the characters made for repetitive and tension-free action scenes, but it also meant that those characters had a lot with which to wrestle. The first movie gave them some room to breathe and address the purgatory of living for centuries or millennia, experiencing the deaths of pretty much everyone they have known, and watching as humanity showed no signs of becoming better, no matter how much good these immortals try to do for them.

Meanwhile, The Old Guard 2 serves as an unfortunate counterpoint to the quieter, more reflective moments of its predecessor. This one is mostly about action and plotting, setting up a couple of new conflicts for the team of immortals and, ultimately, leaving them hanging for the next sequel.

There's nothing inherently wrong with a cliffhanger ending, even if there's no guarantee that the promise of paying it off will be fulfilled anytime soon (As of this writing, no announcement of a follow-up installment has been made, but one imagines that will change shortly after the movie's release). It's frustrating, to be sure, that all of the plot here builds to a couple of anticlimaxes, but an ending—or the real lack thereof—is just one component of a story.

The genuine disappointment of director Victoria Mahoney's sequel is that the story leading up to that conclusion has far less interest in its characters than its predecessor, even though a lot has changed for them by the end of the previous movie and a good amount changes during the course of this entry. Take Andy (Charlize Theron)—or Andromache, as she was named during her first lifetime in an ancient era. For more than 6,000 years, she has been immortal—dying and coming back to life more times than she can recall. In the first movie, she realized she had become mortal, and if one is wondering what that does to such a person, this movie seems uninterested in the answer.

After all, Andy and her team of still-immortal warriors still have more fighting to do and yet another conspiracy to unravel. In practice, nothing has really changed about Andy, who still leads her team into fights and shootouts that now could very much kill her, such as an opening action sequence that has the team taking out an arms dealer and his henchmen at a secluded mansion. Is a formerly immortal character who still behaves as if she's immortal really much of a change to her or the dynamics of the action?

The rest of the team feels less important this time around, too, from very-long-time lovers Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli), to the briefly exiled Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), and to relative newcomer Nile (KiKi Layne), who turns out to be the reason that Andy can die. Chiwetel Ejifor's Copley returns, as well, but primarily as expository support, and Henry Golding shows up as Tuah, an immortal librarian—basically the keeper of all the exposition the characters require.

By the way, Nile's newly revealed mystical power becomes the reason Discord (Uma Thurman), the movie's main villain who has actually been around longer than Andy, tries to divide the team. She wants to eliminate every immortal—apart from her, presumably—for reasons that might be clarified in the next installment or don't actually need to make sense, as long as her goal means Andy and the team keep fighting and shooting.

The action, by the way, is fine enough, although even it has stopped considering the quality of these characters that makes them more than experts in punching, kicking, and shooting. That the team, apart from Andy, can quickly heal, reattach lost appendages and limbs, and even return to life barely figures into the action sequences in this installment, which feels like a waste of a gimmick that, in this movie, only really matters in terms of action and plot.

It definitely doesn't mean much to the characters otherwise, even though Booker has so much guilt over betraying his friends that he's considering giving up his immortality (There's an incredibly vague bit of magic that makes lost immortality little more than an obstacle to overcome) and Andy reunites with old partner Quynh (Veronica Ngô). Some may recall that Quynh was punished for witchcraft and has spent several hundred years locked in an iron maiden at the bottom of the ocean—repeatedly drowning that entire time. All things considered, she makes a pretty quick recovery from that trauma and fits right into the plot, with little time for the two women to hash out what should be at least some hard feelings.

Essentially, the first movie cared enough about the dilemma and pain of its immortal heroes to give those ideas some weight in between the action and the plotting. The Old Guard 2 primarily concerns itself with plot and action, leaving its characters in a state of unexamined limbo.

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