action – Movies That Are Worse Than “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015)

The Old Guard – Review

It’s a shame, for many reasons, that movie theatres are locked down right now–I’d love to see how The Old Guard, Netflix’s new superhero movie, would have played alongside its box-office competition. You’d be entirely forgiven for overlooking it, a mid-budget adaptation of a comic book you probably haven’t heard of. It’s not a perfect film. it’s intermittently muddy and certainly overlong. It is, however, a clear and immediate standout, and if there were any justice in the world, it would immediately become the pacesetter for the rest of the genre, because despite its handful of faults it is kinetic, grippingly human, and an absolute blast.

Charlize Theron plays Andromache of Scythia, better known as Andy, one of four freedom-fighting warriors afflicted with an apparent inability to die. She’s the de facto leader of her team by virtue of experience; Nicky (Luca Marinelli) and Joe (Marwan Kenzari) have been around since the Crusades and Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts) first failed to pass away in service of Napoleon, but Andy has been around for at least thousands of years longer; when pressed with “how old?” she responds with a shuttered “too old.” Charlize Theron has been more recently known, with good reason, as a fighter–think Atomic Blonde or heck, this blog’s namesake, Mad Max: Fury Road–but The Old Guard, with an unusual amount of restraint for a superhero movie, lets her emotional performance take center stage. The role asks a lot of her, but Theron effortlessly delivers; Andy has believably spent the last couple millenia steeped in both the art of killing and the loss that comes with it, and this ennui permeates every aspect of her work. It’s a surprisingly delicate portrayal, and one that pairs well with the rest of the cast; her loneliness plays brilliantly against the shimmering love between Nicky and Joe, and her world-weariness illuminates the newness of Booker’s own grief. Andy and her crew spend their time anonymously traveling the world and rescuing those that need it, but both she and the larger plot are shaken by the discovery of a new immortal, Nile (KiKi Layne), an American marine in Afghanistan who bleeds to death and then, well, doesn’t. Even through these supernatural happenings, though, The Old Guard is willing to stand back and let its characters breathe, and the results are oddly captivating.

Charlize Theron as Andromache of Scythia.

In fact, the whole film is suffused with a deliberate patience, a hallmark of director Gina Prince-Bythewood, best known for sun-soaked romances like Love & Basketball and Beyond the Lights. Lesser directors might get swept away in the genre, but Prince-Bythewood is willing to the parts speak for themselves, a remarkable move for a superhero movie with remarkable consequences. Imagine, if you will, a Marvel movie with gay characters (already a stretch, considering the outright laughable attempt that Endgame, the twenty-somethingth entry in the franchise, thought was good enough for representation, but stay with me here). They’re being held hostage, and a guard taunts one of them by asking “is that your boyfriend?” What happens now? In a bog-standard superhero movie, we expect the character to look up, some fight music to start playing, the hero to kick the snot out of the guards, and then wipe his brow and say “yeah, he’s my boyfriend.” Which would be, you know, fine! But Prince-Bythewood recognizes this for what it is–a golden opportunity for something more–and gives Joe, one of the immortals, the opportunity for a sublime declaration of love, the kind of soliloquy that would sparkle against a sunset and somehow does the same thing in a prison hold. It is, without exaggeration, the most romantic moment I’ve seen in any movie of 2020, romance or otherwise. And then yeah, sure, they kick the snot out of the guards after, but that part isn’t even on-screen because The Old Guard so clearly knows what is most interesting about its premise.

When The Old Guard strays away from its central team of immortals, though, the seams start to show. The main antagonist, Harry Melling’s anemic take on a Martin Shkreli type, barely registers as enough of a character to be of any interest; his central plan actually has a fair amount of ethical questioning behind it, but he himself takes too much pleasure in malice for his plans to have the moral weight the movie clearly hopes they do. And his right-hand man, a conflicted ex-CIA member played by the consistently excellent Chiwetel Ejiofor, is never given enough meat to make a meal; his presence in the film rarely extends beyond exposition. They work fine–there’s no real dealbreakers in The Old Guard–but it’s still a relatively sour note in a movie this enjoyable. And rest assured, it is enjoyable. The Old Guard has a checklist of summer blockbuster criteria to meet and crashes into each item head-on. The team moves like men and women with centuries of lethal practice, and the fight scenes are both inventive and (sometimes literally) bone-crunching. Occasional dips in clarity are a bummer–the opening fight in an underground bunker is dim and dresses all its combatants in the same tactical black–but thankfully, the movie gets its act together in little time afterwords and keeps the brutal action in frame, finishing with a fight scene in an office building that’ll have you pumping your fist in glee.

And frankly, a lot about The Old Guard is likely to elicit some kind of joy. It feels like every inch of this movie is better than it needs to be. They could have cast anybody, but they cast Charlize Theron. They could have just slapped some tac gear on the team, but they outfit them with their signature weapons from the time they first resurrected. They could have skimped on the characterization, but they made the characters the focus in a bizarre but welcome choice that grounds the entire proceedings and makes you cheer for Nile, not just because she just cleared a room of baddies, but because you saw what brought her to this decision, and gives both parts equal weight. It is not without faults, but its faults are new faults for the genre, and I’ll also give it kudos for the literal only sequel tease I’ve cared about in years. In more ways than one, I hope The Old Guard is the herald of the new.

Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey – Review

After uninspired but entertaining entries like Shazam and Aquaman and dour and useless movies like Man of Steel and Joker, DC seems to have realized that for comic book movies, the path of least resistance (and, commonly, the path of better movie) is prioritizing entertainment. Pick your tone however you’d like, but you’ll get more whizz-bang for your buck if your hero/villian eschews embodying any given philosophy in favor of punching real good or whatever, especially considering The Dark Knight and the Watchmen HBO series have already pretty effectively plumbed the depths of superhero philosophy and we might as well stop trying. (Looking squarely at you, The Boys. Please stop trying.) I don’t mean to sound bitter, though I almost certainly do; I think I’m just burnt out by an awful lot of posturing superhero movies about moral responsibility with nothing of value to say, and it’s nice to see Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey getting back to the basics and consisting almost exclusively of people punching real good or whatever. Sure, it’s a tale full of sound and fury signifying nothing, but truly, what kind of ontological sourpuss nerd would be here asking what it signifies?

The question of DC’s best movie is probably better left to a different breed of ontological sourpuss nerds, but Birds of Prey is by far its most exuberant, a figurative and occasionally literal explosion of color made by a team openly having the time of their lives. Plot points don’t always hold up under later scrutiny, or really even present scrutiny, but you won’t have long to mull them over before the movie sweeps you away. Ostensibly, Birds of Prey is about Harley Quinn, criminal psychologist turned just criminal, picking up the pieces in the wake of a nasty dumping from the Joker. This is more elevator pitch than plot, though; the movie is just as ready to be free of Jared Leto’s Joker as we all are, and within roughly fifteen minutes it drops the pretense and reveals its true purpose: providing Harley & Co. a cavalcade of setpieces to crash around in, a task it approaches with aplomb. Birds of Prey is unafraid to lean into its comic book origins, featuring frequent narration from its title character and painting the screen with neon colors and subtitles detailing Harley’s enemies’ name and potential grievances in a gag that never really stops being funny. The many fight scenes are frequent highlights, too; a few are obscured by darkness and shaky cam, but the majority we get to see are manic, bone-crunching, and quite a lot of fun. One particular sequence in a police impound lot stands par excellence alongside the Raid and John Wick films as a sterling example of the ruin you can visit upon a human body with various household objects.

Despite its clear excitement to be here, Birds of still falls Prey to many of its genre’s common pitfalls. For one, it’s overstuffed with characters; one major player introduced an hour and a half in rather astutely notes “I feel like I’ve wandered into something that isn’t really about me.” I assume this is because the audience is supposed to know these characters already: Jurnee Smollet-Bell’s character apparently has superpowers that I certainly didn’t know about but all the characters did; Ewan McGregor’s character, Black Mask, puts on a black mask, and you can feel the movie elbow your ribs and whisper into your ear “that’s Black Mask.” If you’re not up on your prereq reading, it’s easy to lose track, in part because few of these characters have many distinguishing traits beyond 1) “quips” and 2) “kicks ass,” and anyways, none of them quip quite as well or kick nearly as much ass as Harley herself.

Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, Chris Messina as Victor Zsasz, and Ewan McGregor as Roman Sionis/Black Mask.

Speaking of Harley, let’s talk about Margot Robbie, a tremendously talented actor whose numerous talents are rarely fully realized. Early career roles like Focus and Wolf of Wall Street can confine her to “hot;” later spots in Mary, Queen of Scots and Bombshell recognize her talent but not her infectious energy. Birds of Prey is possibly the first movie since her stunning work in I, Tonya to recognize just how fun she is to watch. Her Harley is magnetic, somehow pulling together wildly disparate threads into a character that’s not only coherent and plausible, but an absolute hoot to watch. Thankfully, the movie understands this, and is justly willing to sacrifice its own coherence on the altar of Harley Quinn Having A Good Time. Don’t mistake this for criticism. Every time Robbie is on screen, Birds of Prey is delightful.

The rest of the actors don’t all acquit themselves as well. Besides Robbie, Rosie Perez and Mary Elizabeth Winstead carve out some enjoyable niches as, respectively, a beleaguered police detective and a talented assassin who’s still working on her theatrics, but everybody is forced to split screen time with, by my count, six other main characters, and consequently, few are given enough breathing room to leave an impact. Ewan McGregor in particular chews the scenery like cud and with about the same productivity. But at the risk of sounding absolutely insufferable, it’s a comic book movie, where talented actors are often reduced de rigueur to rote line readings, and after I stopped trying to engage with it and let it wash over me, I was far less concerned with its quality. They’re getting their paychecks, and I can’t complain.

All in all, I think I liked Birds of Prey, but give me a week and I suspect I’ll be hard-pressed to remember much about it. It’s about as popcorny as popcorn entertainment gets, a Technicolor rat king of (admittedly very cool) names like Victor Zsasz and Huntress jumping from locale to locale to commit some crimes that we may or may not be rooting for. Maybe not an enduring formula, but also not a bad way to spend the evening.