‘The Old Guard 2’ Is The Awkward Middle Child Nobody Likes

I never thought The Old Guard was as good as everyone else seemed to. It was fine, don’t get me wrong. It had kinetic hand-to-hand action and an intriguing premise and a bit of nuanced existentialism for good measure, but it never seemed like the starting point of a franchise, and if The Old Guard 2 is anything to go by, Netflix agrees with me.

You can blame other things, of course, including the messy corporate restructuring and necessary but long-winded strikes that derailed a lot of projects in 2023. Despite having been filmed in 2022, this sequel’s post-production was halted completely, and its release three years later has been suspiciously unceremonious. It’s almost like the intervening years allowed Netflix execs to realise what I suspected all along – that the desire for a sequel was based on short-term popularity, itself an outgrowth of the COVID-19 pandemic meaning everyone was stuck at home and could only find fleeting joy in mediocre entertainment, and not, crucially, on the merits of the film’s world, story, or characters.

This becomes obvious quite early in The Old Guard 2. The first film knew better than to pay much attention to its premise, which is about a group of immortal warriors who safeguard the future of mankind by cutting people up with swords. Director Gina Prince-Bythewood sometimes used that as an excuse to ponder big, nuanced ideas like love, morality, purpose, self-identity, and depression, wondering how those very human concerns might contort across inhuman spans of time. But she mostly used it to keep the action fun, understanding that this premise can’t hold up to scrutiny. New director Victoria Mahoney and returning scribe Greg Rucka (Heart of Stone, Batman: Gotham Knight), who admittedly wrote the graphic novels on which the films are based, can’t help but try to explain the internal mythology and its complex rules at every turn, which drastically diminishes the allure.

It also expects a familiarity with the events of the first film, which is a little unreasonable given how much time has elapsed since its release. This is forgivable, especially since the delays were unforeseen, but it’s also symptomatic of a wider problem, which is that this film is unashamedly Episode 2 of a three-episode miniseries, utterly unable to work without the establishing context of the first film and the climactic payoffs to themes and plot points of a third movie that at this point might never arrive.

This cynical circumstance is quite unique to our current era, one of artistic output reimagined as content plopping routinely off of conveyor belts snaking through the studios of streaming giants. The Old Guard 2 feels like this all the way through; serviceable, glossy, workmanlike entertainment stripped of its intrigue and energy. Its job is to set up the sequel, nothing more and nothing less.

Plot-wise, this works thusly. Andromache of Scythia, otherwise known hilariously as Andy (Charlize Theron, Atomic Blonde, Gringo, Fast Ten), is now mortal after the events of the first film but is mostly content to live out the rest of her days with her crew, comprising Nile Freeman (KiKi Layne, If Beale Street Could Talk), James Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Lion King), Joe (Marwan Kenzari, The Night Agent, Black Adam, Aladdin), and Nicky (Luca Marinelli). Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts, The Regime, Amsterdam, The Mustang), who was exiled from the group in the last movie – which I had to Google, proving my point – also returns with surprisingly little fanfare. These guys are all about business as usual, at least until Andy’s old immortal mate Quynh (Veronica Ngo, Furies) is discovered chilling at the bottom of the ocean in an Iron Maiden by new Big Bad Discord (Uma Thurman, The King of Kings, Wingwomen, Red, White & Royal Blue), turning her against Andy and, naturally, all of humanity.

(L-R) Henry Golding as Tuah, Luca Marinelli as Nicky, Marwan Kenzari as Joe, Charlize Theron as Andy and KiKi Layne as Nile in The Old Guard 2. Cr. Eli Joshua Ade/Netflix © 2025

It’s a good cast, this. The ongoing meta joke of a movie about immortals starring a woman who is almost 50 but looks 22 continues to work, and hey, Uma Thurman has a sword at one point, which is a nice reminder of Kill Bill, even if her performance feels like a transplant from a movie that takes itself much less seriously than this one (and would likely be a lot better for it). But everyone’s saddled with underwritten roles that are reliant on dynamics we’ve forgotten about. Any depth to the characters comes through in committed performances, not the script, which is content to underserve almost everyone except Andy and Quynh, a relationship we have very little context for aside from an admittedly well-done oner that shows their shared history.

There’s an old idea that keeping a monster off-screen is always scarier than showing it, since whatever the viewer’s mind conjures will inevitably be more terrifying than the reality. The mythology in The Old Guard 2 works the same way. The fantastical immortal gimmick doesn’t need to be laboriously explained; on the contrary, it’s more interesting when even the characters don’t seem to understand it particularly well. Here we’re not just treated to much more exposition than seems reasonable, but the introduction of a character, Tuah (Henry Golding, The Tiger’s Apprentice, Persuasion, The Gentlemen), who, as far as I can tell, exists solely to deliver it.

If nothing else, the action is still pretty decent, if a bit more impersonal. It still has that team-oriented vibe and mostly feels pleasantly tactile, with some more embellished chases and obvious Wuxia-style wirework being wonky exceptions. Almost all of the jokes are bundled up in the fights – including a fairly funny one about limb regeneration – and a lot of the most important characterisation occurs there too, which is perhaps why it’s so frustrating for the audience to ultimately be denied any payoff by a cliffhanger ending that confuses leaving things open for a sequel with being completely, unsatisfyingly unresolved.

The Old Guard 2 is far from the worst example of Netflix chasing a pound note, but it’s one of the more obvious and disappointing, especially since the first film was decent, and the way it has been milked since is so obvious. We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of needing a sequel to feel satisfied with the overall story, but not really wanting one because this instalment wasn’t very good. Your move, Netflix.