CHARLIZE’S ANGELS
Meet the mercenaries who can’t be killed in a fantasy action romp
EVEN before The Old Guard has settled into its stride as a fantasy thriller of cherishable silliness, the action has shifted from Marrakesh to Afghanistan and a ‘hostage situation’ in South Sudan.
Later it will ping between rural France, Central London and a few places not so easy to find on a map, such as ancient Scythia.
But it isn’t geography keeping us on our toes here, it’s history. Charlize Theron plays the leader of a quartet of soldiers of conscience, hardened not by years or even decades of warfare but centuries.
They are all immortal, you see. They have no superpowers except that fatal wounds incurred in battle quickly heal over and they jerk back to life, like special effects king Ray Harryhausen’s skeletons in Jason And The Argonauts.
This is less of an asset than you might think. Theron’s character, Andromache of Scythia, is suffering an existential crisis, having fought the good fight for several millennia only to realise that ‘the world isn’t getting any better, it’s getting worse’.
Conveniently known as plain Andy, she is the oldest of the gang of four. She found Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli) during the Crusades, while the most recent addition was Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), picked up during the Napoleonic Wars.
NONE of them knows why they ended up as an immortal — and now there is a fifth recruit, a young U.S. Marine (KiKi Layne) ‘killed’ in 21st-century action.
In the meantime, the rapacious founder of a pharmaceutical empire (Harry Melling) has heard about our super troopers and wants to harvest their DNA to make an unimaginable fortune.
His guileless sidekick is a former CIA man played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, who seems pretty bright yet evidently hasn’t worked out that the weaselly little guy with the big ears, mad eyes and English accent might be a baddie.
All this is made watchable mainly by Theron, so revelling in her sweaty-yet-serene alpha-female persona (see Atomic Blonde, see Mad Max: Fury Road) that the film begins to look like a two-hour deodorant commercial — less The Old Guard than The Right Guard.
But she is also a terrific comic actress when she’s allowed to be. Alas, director Gina PrinceBythewood and writer Greg
Rucka, adapting his own graphic novel series, miss the opportunity to make The Old Guard deliberately funny.
It’s still a hoot, but unwittingly. So when Booker remarks of Andy, ‘that woman has forgotten more ways to kill than entire armies will ever learn’, we’re really not meant to snigger, still less when Andy hunkers down in a remote French cave that she says she stumbled on around 1150, meaning the 12th century, not ten to twelve.
THERE’S a lot more po-faced action in Greyhound, a taut World War II thriller starring and written by Tom Hanks, who adapted it from C.S. Forester’s novel The Good Shepherd.
Hanks plays decent, god-fearing Captain Ernest Krause, whose first command, a U.S. destroyer codenamed Greyhound, must undertake the perilous task in 1942 of accompanying a large convoy of merchant vessels across the North Atlantic to Liverpool.
Once the ships enter the so-called
‘Black Pit’, beyond the range of air protection, they are especially vulnerable to raids by packs of German U-boats.
THAT’S what happens, repeatedly. In truth, much of the action is a little samey; there’s only so much tension you can squeeze out of umpteen U-boat attacks.
But it’s always a pleasure to see Hanks in roles like this. We already know from films such as Apollo 13 (1995), Captain Phillips (2013) and Sully (2016) that he’s Hollywood’s ultimate captaincy material. And while he is often described as a latter-day James Stewart, this is more of a Henry Fonda part — dependable, courageous, noble and, ultimately, just too wholesome to lose to those darned Nazis.