The Old Guard 2 Review
The Old Guard 2 (2025) Film Review, a movie directed by Victoria Mahoney, written by Greg Rucka, Sarah L. Walker and Leandro Fernandez and starring Charlize Theron, Uma Thurman, KiKi Layne, Matthias Schoenaerts, Marwan Kenzari, Luca Marinelli, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Veronica Ngo, Henry Golding, Kamil Nozynski, Slavko Sobin, Lorenzo Acquaviva, Peter Arpesella and Todd Cattell.
How could director Victoria Mahoney’s sequel to the surprise Netflix hit, The Old Guard, possibly falter like this? That was the question on my mind as I was 20 minutes into the new sequel, The Old Guard 2. Strong parts for women in action films are rare these days, so when Oscar-winner Charlize Theron latches onto a project, one can’t help but take notice. The first picture in this one-time promising franchise was spectacularly entertaining, but the sequel is, sadly, just another unsatisfying attempt to improve upon perfection.
Theron portrays Andy, a fearless leader of some immortal fighters who take on some serious threats to their way of survival. Theron is a first-rate actress, yet you wouldn’t have any idea of how good she’s been in other projects judging from her work in this film. She telephones-in her performance and that’s putting it kindly. It’s not her fault. Someone put so many characters into this sequel with so little development to back them up that every single character here feels more thinly veiled than the previous one. It’s not necessarily Thereon’s fault that they wrote lines she could probably recite in her sleep and failed to give her role the necessary backbone to hold up the foundations of the picture’s threadbare story line.
Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli) help set up a car chase that goes nowhere in an early sequence that seems as haphazard as it is disappointing. The 43-year old James (the under-utilized Chiwetel Ejiofor) is on Andy’s side now, and KiKi Layne’s formidable Nile pops up too, but this is a case of the filmmakers bringing on more characters than they have story lines to properly support. Despite attempts at lavish action sequences, the scenes here almost always fall flat and don’t ever deliver on their promise to truly thrill audiences.
Dragged into this fiasco is the always intriguing Uma Thurman as Discord who seems like she’s arrived from another movie altogether and is meant to inject some tension into the plot. Thurman is actually one of the more forgivable aspects of The Old Guard 2 when one takes into account other aspects of it like Henry Golding’s disappointingly obvious character, Tuah.
There’s also the matter of Matthias Schoenaerts’ Booker who has a backstory that certainly gets lost in the shuffle in a movie that is stuffed with quite a few characters who are all dressed up with nowhere to go. Teaming up with Discord is Quynh (Veronice Ngo) for no other reason than the fact that the screenwriters think they’ll create dramatic tension in the plot when they shift the focus to Quynh. There is some intensity at the start of the film, but it ultimately never boils. It all simmers throughout as the performers pump energy into scenes that lead us nowhere intriguing enough to really care.
Immortal characters are always a good hook for a movie looking to make major philosophical points, but this film simply doesn’t work as a standalone movie. If you didn’t see the first one, you’ll be lost and if you did see the first one, you’ll wonder how things went from really exciting to dull in just several years. This movie shifts to different locations and introduces enough characters to confuse anyone not sitting in front of the screen with a scorecard and not having a summary of the previous picture in front of them. You know that scroll from the beginning of the Star Wars films? We needed that kind of device here at the start! Badly.
The Old Guard 2 never really gels with its basic premise which feels like it hasn’t been formulated yet. It almost seems as if the first one was such a big hit, that everybody had to get together again to make a new picture without figuring out the reasoning behind the necessity of this unnecessary sequel. Thurman being on board sounds like a genius plan, but she is merely adequate in a performance that never rises above what it needs to be to justify this film’s existence in the first place.
Charlize Theron is one of the hardest-working actresses in show business today. The fact that she even made The Old Guard 2 is proof that she’s determined to give her fans what they want. A few notes for everyone involved with this sequel, though, would suggest more rehearsals before shooting and more discussions of key characters’ motivations to help clear up many vague characterizations. If this movie was edited down from a longer film, I’d be interested in seeing the original rough cut. Perhaps, the film got lost in the editing room. That’s the only reason to explain how a picture like this could have become such a pointless misfire. I wouldn’t call it talky, but it doesn’t put up the action it needed to in a way that it should have in order to compete with the distinguished original The Old Guard film from five years back.
Rating: 4/10
Leave your thoughts on this The Old Guard 2 review and the film below in the comments section. Readers seeking to support this type of content can visit our Patreon Page and become one of FilmBook’s patrons. Readers seeking more film reviews can visit our Movie Review Page, our Movie Review Twitter Page, and our Movie Review Facebook Page. Want up-to-the-minute notifications? FilmBook staff members publish articles by Email, Mobile App, Google News, Apple News, Feedly, Twitter, Faceboo