"The Old Guard": Life is Very Long, Even with a Boyfriend

Immortals usually spend their time becoming Leonardo da Vinci and Mozart, although in one story I read, a girl is trapped forever at age 12, which limits her life chances.  They generally keep a low profile, since, depending on the era, people who discover their secret will want to burn them at the stake or dissect them.  But The Old Guard has been fighting: wars, insurrections, rebellions, wherever they can help.  They are:

1. Andy (Charlize Theron), born as Andromache the Scythian, and also apparently the Andromache who was the wife of Hector in the Iliad.  She is bisexual; for a long time she traveled with another immortal, the Vietnamese Quyhn, but during the 17th century witch hunts, Quyhn was dropped into the ocean and lost.

Something I find annoying about Andy: she speaks flawless American English.  When you learn a new language as an adult, you always have an accent.  Scythian was an Iranian language, so Andy should sound like she's from Tehran.

2.-3. Joe and Nicky (Marwan Kenzari, top photo, Luca Marinelli), who were soldiers on opposing sides during the Crusades.  They kept killing each other until they realized that they were immortal.  They have been lovers for 800 years.

4.  Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts, left), a soldier in the Napoleonic Wars, who also speaks English with an American accent, even though.....

But...they are actually fighting, foot soldiers in the Civil War or World War 2?  How will that change anything?  Shouldn't they get elected to Congress?   Or writing speeches?

Especially since their immortality means that they don't age, and they=recover from wounds quickly.  They still feel pain,  and they still die -- they just get resurrected over and over, until eventually the immortality wears off.  Wouldn't you want to stay away from situations involving painful deaths?

Turns out that there's a Divine Hand at work, guiding them to missions that will save the world.  Rather, the people they save have descendants who do great thing.  But they never save Hitler's grandmother.

The Divine Hand also helps them find new immortals through telepathic communication.  Andy just recruited young Marine Nile (Kiki Layne) from her post in Afghanistan.

At that moment, heir ally, an American CIA agent with a British accent (Chiwetel Ejiofor, left), betrays them to the evil CEO of a big pharma company (Harry Melling, below), who wants to slice them up to develop anti-aging drugs.  Also, one of the immortals is a traitor.

I should have liked this movie a lot more than I did. The immortals consist of an open, "he's not my boyfriend -- he's my everything" gay couple, a bisexual, a heterosexual who hasn't dated since the Battle of Waterloo, and a marine who exhibits no romantic interest in anyone. Plus a lot of racial diversity; how often in a superhero movie is everyone in the room black?

But it consisted mostly of battle scenes where the immortals kill lots of people or else die agonizing deaths and then get resurrected, or not, or else get tied down to have things painfully extracted by evil geneticists.  Followed by scenes where they sit around saying "we've lost so much over the years.  What's the point?" 

No beefcake, no interesting exteriors.  They visit London, Paris, and Amsterdam, but we get no sense of the distinctiveness of these cities; they're all interchangeable. 

Plus the premise bugged me.  You live forever; you can acquire a vast amount of knowledge and skill.  Why not go out and become Mozart, instead of spending yuur immortality getting stabbed, shot, and burned at the stake.

My grade: A for diversity, C for actually slogging through.

By the way, you may recognize evil CEO as evil Cousin Dudley in the Harry Potter franchise.