Theron a tough, moody superhero in ‘Old Guard’

Just because you can live doesn’t mean you’d want to.

Especially if a substantial portion of your life is devoted to fighting what over the centuries have come to feel like endless battles against what you hope is evil (can we ever be really sure?).

It gets old, as Andromache of Scythia says in “The Old Guard,” streaming on Netflix on Friday, July 10.

forever

‘The Old Guard’

Great

Fair

Gina Prince-Bythewood.

Charlize Theron, KiKi Layne, Matthias Schoenaerts.

R for sequences of graphic violence, and language.

Streaming on Netflix.

Bad

Good

Bomb

You can call her Andy. Everyone else does. As played by Charlize Theron, she is the leader of a small group of immortal (more or less) soldiers still trying to fight the good fight, despite being bone tired and soul weary and wondering whether their efforts, stretching back millennia in Andy’s case, have done any good.

After all, things aren’t getting better, one character muses. They’re getting worse.

That’s the premise of the film, presumably intended as a franchise kickoff, which wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Based on the graphic novel by Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernández (Rucka wrote the screenplay), “The Old Guard” is directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, who directed “Love & Basketball” and “The Secret Life of Bees,” among others.

It’s not genre action elevated to art, but it points in that direction. There’s a lot of soul-searching among the bunch between bullet-spraying, neck-breaking fights.

In addition to Andy, who’s been doing this so long she can’t remember when she started, there’s Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), who fought in the Napoleonic Wars, and Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli), who killed each other during the Crusades while fighting on different sides, but somewhere along the line became, and remain, lovers.

As we learn in an ambush early on, the group’s members can be injured and seemingly killed — they certainly feel pain. But they heal astonishingly quickly. Bullets pop out of their skin, stab wounds close, fractures mend, etc. Thus, even when ambushed, they win most of their battles.

While they’re wondering if it all means anything, a young Marine named Nile (KiKi Layne) has her throat cut in Afghanistan and, to her great surprise, recovers. (Her fellow soldiers are pretty surprised, too.) Nile becomes a reluctant recruit — Andy basically kidnaps her — and slowly comes around to what her heretofore undiscovered powers mean.

(Didn’t she ever skin her knee falling off a bike? Eh, why quibble?)

Meanwhile there’s a new bad guy to reckon with: Merrick (Harry Melling), a bratty brainiac who likes to refer to himself as the youngest billionaire in pharma. Maybe it sounds good at the parties he goes to, but it’s a curious bragging point. Anyway, Merrick wants to study what makes Andy and the others immortal so that he can monetize it, and he understands that he can basically experiment on them forever, or at least until he figures it all out. It’s not like they’re going to die.

Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a former CIA operative who is crucial to the various goings on, another member of a genuinely impressive cast. He doesn’t do much fighting, but the others do, and Prince-Bythewood proves accomplished at directing set pieces that run toward the more balletic bone-crunching examples of the genre. Theron in particular, with films like “Atomic Blonde” on her resume, is good at this sort of thing.

But she’s good at the moody too.

There are some double-crosses and a few kinks in the whole immortality bit, all of which make “The Old Guard” a more thoughtful movie than we expect from this kind of thing. It’s too long — it certainly feels longer than its nearly two-hour running time — and Merrick,

stuff, frankly, isn’t a satisfyingly threatening villain.

Then again, maybe he’s not the only villain. The foibles of human nature are what Andy is really fighting against, and it remains an uphill battle.