The Old Guard

The Old Guard (2020) is about a group of mercenaries who have not been able to die for centuries. Andy is thousands of years old. The others are younger: one from the Crusades, one a soldier stretching back to the Napoleonic era. They are wounded, they die, and seconds later the wounds close. For work they fight for whoever hires them, wherever. The problem is that a pharmaceutical company learns they exist and wants to take one alive to work out why they do not die. Immortality stops being a gift and becomes a laboratory subject. The best idea in it is the exhaustion of immortality. Andy has spent thousands of years trying to put the world right and has watched it stay wrong; she no longer believes. The second idea is harder: immortality is not endless. One day, for no known reason, it stops. It is adapted from Greg Rucka's comic and he wrote the screenplay himself. Gina Prince-Bythewood became the first Black woman to direct a large budget comic book film. The fights are shot with a low cut rate; you can see who is doing what. The long relationship between two of the characters is the quietest and best written thing in it. It was made by Netflix and widely watched. It runs 125 minutes. Good for: action, comic adaptations, and fantasy. Less good for: the villain is thinly written and the ending is left open.