Netflix offers a welcome twist on superheroes
‘The Old Guard’ is sincere and asks pertinent questions, writes Clarisse Loughrey. Plus the week’s other releases
Dir: Gina Prince-Bythewood. Starring: Charlize Theron, KiKi Layne, Matthias Schoenaerts, Marwan Kenzari, Luca Marinelli, Chiwetel Ejiofor. 15 cert, 124 mins.
It’s no wonder that Hollywood’s obsessed with superheroes – now, more than ever, we crave the assurance that our world will (and can) be saved. The immortal warriors of Netflix’s The Old Guard, adapted by writer Greg Rucka from his own graphic novel series, must wrestle with these expectations. Why is it that we cling
so firmly to the idea that Superman will swoop in and fix all of our problems?
Our heroes have all died before, only to discover that, in their case, the condition isn’t permanent. Andromache of Scythia (Charlize Theron), the oldest of the warriors, is implied to be the legendary Amazonian who battled Heracles – and lost. Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts) fell in the Napoleonic Wars. Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli) are now lovers, but were once on opposing sides of the Crusades. They are trapped now in a cycle of death and resurrection. Bullets are absorbed and then repelled. Bones shatter and reform.
But they are exceptional only in their supernatural resilience – a gift that’s arrived without purpose and, as experience has shown, can be taken away without warning. When a new member (KiKi Layne’s Nile, a steady and compassionate presence) joins their ranks, she must wrestle with the team’s own disillusionment. They’ve fought for the oppressed for centuries, but now can’t imagine a future where their help won’t be needed. Their work is interminable. There’s no arch-villain they can defeat to save humanity once and for all. “The world isn’t getting better, it’s getting worse,” Andromache tells her companions. Her words are laced with disdain.
In fact, all blustering talk about “saving mankind” is reserved for their adversary, Merrick (Harry Melling, playing Martin Shkreli if he went to Eton), a big-shot pharma CEO who developed a breakthrough cancer treatment and now thinks the immortals are key to extending humanity’s lifespan – even if that means keeping them in a cage for the rest of eternity. He argues it’s a moral obligation, though Melling’s deranged, shit-eating grin hints at the self-interest and greed that lie behind the curtain.
The Old Guard doles out a few lessons in grittiness, proving it’s not just about delivering washed-out aesthetics, but moral weight. It’s mature and sincere – a comic book film that’s neither a quip-fest, nor a humourless bore. It places its LGBT+ characters front-and-centre in a way that instantly puts the rest of the genre to shame. Joe, at one point, delivers a swoon-worthy ode to undying love, ending with the words: “He’s not my boyfriend… he’s all and he’s more.”
The film, confined to a mid-level budget, doesn’t strive for epic scale; it draws instead from the brutal, bloody intimacy of the John Wick franchise. Theron, here as in Atomic Blonde and Mad Max: Fury Road, fights like a finely tuned machine but finds tenderness between the punches. The camera excitedly hurries after her as she storms through modernist offices, abandoned buildings, and muddied battlefields.
None of this would work without someone like Gina Prince-Bythewood behind the lens. She’s a director who can slip so easily between genre fare – having worked on Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger series and a nowscrapped Spider-Man spin-off, Silver and Black – and the tender romanticism of 2014’s Beyond the Lights. Thanks to her, The Old Guard’s pivotal scene is also its more serene. It’s a moment of wordless understanding between Andromache and a young pharmacist, who tends to her wounds without question or judgement. Our hero comes to the realisation that, not only does she do good, but she empowers others to do the same. So can we, Prince-Bythewood tells us.
This makes the live-action films look good
SCOOB!
Dir: Tony Cervone. Starring: Will Forte, Zac Efron, Amanda Seyfried, Gina Rodriguez, Mark Wahlberg, Jason Isaacs. PG cert, 89 mins.
Big-screen adaptations are too often stifled by their reverence for the source material. The opposite is true of SCOOB!, a computer-animated Scooby-Doo reboot that shows an odd contempt for the 50-year-old franchise. Its screenplay is keen to distance itself from the formulaic yet pleasurable adventures of Mystery Inc – a team of amateur sleuths who drive around in a puke-green camper van and discover that every ghost is just a grump in a mask, attempting to cover up some white-collar crimes.
At one point, a disgruntled bowling alley employee describes Shaggy as “a middle-aged man’s idea of how a teenage hippy talks”. The character’s famous speech pattern – heavily punctuated with the words “like”, “man”, and “zoinks” – is still intact, but gone is any hint of his stoner credentials. All those cravings for “Scooby snacks” have magically subsided. Fred (voiced by Zac Efron), the ascot-wearing, de facto leader of the group, gets dismissed as a “poor man’s Hemsworth”. Who knows whether that’s meant to be Chris or Liam. And the show’s most famous line, “And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids”? It’s cut off before the end, as if we’re all meant to be tired of hearing it.
SCOOB! believes that these old cartoons are in need of a full facelift. They must become bright, buzzy, modern – a fine distraction for younger audiences, especially now that the film’s planned cinematic release has turned into a digital one. But here that involves ignoring almost all the core ingredients of the original show (haunted house, secret passages, an extended chase sequence), in favour of creating an extended cinematic universe of Hanna-Barbera characters.
Shaggy (Will Forte) and Scooby (Frank Welker, the character’s official voice since 2002) are abducted by the superhero Blue Falcon (Mark Wahlberg) and his sidekicks, robotic pup Dynomutt (Ken Jeong) and Dee Dee Skyes (Kiersey Clemons) All three are borrowed from various, now half-forgotten animated shows. They reveal that Scooby is under threat from Dick Dastardly (Jason Isaacs), of Wacky Races fame, all because – drumroll – he’s actually the last living descendant of Alexander the Great’s favourite dog, Peritas, and is the key to unlocking a treasure stored behind the gates of the Underworld. Dastardly, at some point, acquired an army of cutesy robots to do his bidding.
To add to the confusion, the film’s cultural references were seemingly collected through a process of repeatedly hitting the “random article” button on Wikipedia. Simon Cowell and This American Life presenter Ira Glass cameo, while Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Anonymous, IKEA, Gerard Depardieu, and
“Shallow” from 2018’s A Star is Born all get a mention. The phrase “mewling millennials” pops up, too. For a modern reboot, SCOOB! feels instantly dated. And its only contribution to the Scooby-Doo mythos is a thuddingly lame backstory to how he got his name.
Granted, the emotional foundations here are strong enough to stop the film spiralling out of control, as Shaggy and Scooby come to embrace the unshakeable bond between man and dog. And the film’s A-list cast – which also includes Amanda Seyfried and Gina Rodriguez as Daphne and Velma, respectively – manage to keep the energy up throughout. It’s just a shame that the most refreshing thing about SCOOB! is how well the live-action films of the early Noughties come off in comparison.
Affleck shines in muddled addiction drama
Finding the Way Back
Dir: Gavin O’Connor. Starring: Ben Affleck, Al Madrigal, Michaela Watkins, Janina Gavankar. 15 cert, 108 mins.
Finding the Way Back is a strange concoction – a pained portrait of alcoholism thrust into the middle of a rousing sports yarn. A basketball star in high school, Jack (Ben Affleck) now lives under the ghostly thrall of addiction. All his days look the same. He’ll take a beer into the shower, then sneak a flask into work. At night, he’ll drink himself into oblivion at the local bar or by emptying his fridge at home – careful always to keep one can ready in the freezer. It’s a dull, poisonous routine.
But, in true Hollywood style, salvation arrives like a bolt from the blue. He’s asked to coach his former team, who haven’t made the playoffs since his own time on the court. With his tough-love approach and strategist’s mind, he moulds these dejected teens into star-athletes, recovering a small part of his former self along the way. They head off to achieve the improbable, while director Gavin O’Connor is left to deal with the strange dissonance that exists in-between underdog idealism and the messy truths of habituation. The latter is beautifully telegraphed by its lead actor.
That idealism stems largely from Brad Ingelsby’s script, which relies heavily on narrative conveniences and melodramatic revelations. The team are blessed with a frictionless path to glory – in fact, it seems like they barely do any work to get there. Meanwhile, every part of Jack’s existence is given its own tragic backstory – why he gave up basketball, why his marriage fell apart, and why he’s fallen into such destructive patterns. By simplifying his pain, the film makes it so much easier to soothe.
With a couple of sports films (2004’s Miracle and 2011’s Warrior) already under his belt, O’Connor should
presumably have handled Finding the Way Back’s match scenes with ease. But they feel flat and joyless, as if he’s tried to filter the entirety of Jack’s own numb perspective. Characters have a tendency to fade into the background – Brandon Wilson’s bashful point guard is the only one of the players with a substantive narrative arc. The rest are all broad sketches: the showboat, the lothario, the clown. Both Janina Gavankar, playing Jack’s ex-wife, and Michaela Watkins, playing his sister, are forced to cycle through their collection of concerned expressions. They’re given little to work with.
Affleck, at least, does his best to fill the dramatic vacuum at the centre of Finding the Way Back. His performance may not be showy, but it deftly captures how a sense of defeat can corrupt both the body and the mind. He moves through the world like he’s carrying every one of his traumas on a yoke. And while O’Connor and Ingelsby may document each pedestrian behaviour, it’s Affleck who works through them with resigned ritualism, repeating patterns to the point that they become automatic. He never seems fully aware of how much he’s drinking, as he firmly reassures those around him that he’s “fine”.
There will, inevitably, be those eager to discuss whether the actor drew from his own experiences of addictive behaviour, having openly discussed the topic in the run-up to the film’s release. But to obsess over personal biography detracts from the forcefulness of his work. For all the film’s contrivances, Affleck still draws us into the lost soul at its centre.
Something’s awry when Hanks fails to charm
Greyhound
Dir: Aaron Schneider. Starring: Tom Hanks, Stephen Graham, Rob Morgan, Karl Glusman, Elisabeth Shue. 12 cert, 91 mins.
Of the films that have bypassed the big screen this summer, with cinema closures halting their original release plans, none have been abjectly terrible. Rather, whether it’s the Judd Apatow dramedy King of Staten Island or the pepto bismol-coloured Trolls World Tour, they’ve all been resolutely fine – pleasant, well-made distractions that go down easily and are soon forgotten. Greyhound, a Second World War sea thriller offloaded to Apple TV+ by Sony Pictures, does not buck that trend.
Its star and screenwriter, the sentient hug that is Tom Hanks, has been in these waters before. As the commander of a US navy ship, he resurrects the stoic if haunted fortitude of the military captain he played in Saving Private Ryan. There are obvious shades of Captain Phillips, too, with Hanks and his crew almost entirely confined to a beleaguered boat for the duration of the film. You half expect it to wash ashore and for Hanks to make friends with a volleyball, just to complete the hat-trick of throwbacks. But such easy
reminiscence of Hanks films gone by only enhances Greyhound’s comparable flatness.
The setting is the USS Keeling, a Navy destroyer that must lead a convoy of ships transporting Allied troops and supplies to Liverpool. Hanks is Ernest Krause, the man in charge, caught between his moral duty and his own understandable insecurities. Playing out largely in real-time vignettes as the Keeling is bombarded with torpedoes and threats, the film is like 24 on the high seas.
It’s also painfully functional, more invested in historical accuracy (impenetrable Navy terminology abounds) than cinematic drama. Nods to Krause’s humanity are never more than superfluous, the great Elisabeth Shue airlifted in as “Wife” for a few largely silent flashback sequences as he remembers better times. Krause’s crew, played by strong character actors such as Stephen Graham, Rob Morgan and Karl Glusman, are by and large wallpaper.
Perhaps much of the film’s character-driven weight got lost in the edit; the film clocks in at a scant 90 minutes. What’s here is fleetingly thrilling, director Aaron Schneider mounting impressive sea action full of crashing waves and near-misses, but it’s also missing something. Hanks has described Greyhound as a passion project, and voiced slight disappointment over its move to Apple, but it lacks the soul or warmth he so regularly brings to these kinds of movies. There’s no heartbreaking catharsis, no right-side-of-treacly plot turns. That might well be the point – every character faceless by design – but it makes Greyhound puzzlingly inert.
Hanks, both on-screen and off, can deliver chicken soup for the soul in his sleep. Hell, he’s spent most of 2020 making us feel intermittently soothed – be it via the comforting openness with which he fought Covid-19, or the time he sent a typewriter to a bullied youngster named Corona. That it doesn’t translate here ought to be studied. Rare is the Hanks movie that leaves you feeling absolutely nothing. Adam White