“The Outdated Guard 2” opens with a kind of “extravagant” violent preludes — on this case, the lit-like-a-Swiffer-commercial Netflix model — that’s attempting to be like one thing out of an previous James Bond film: a sequence through which the over-the-top high quality is linked to how little we’re advised about what’s truly happening. Andy (Charlize Theron), in sun shades and darkish hair, is main her crew ­— I name them the I-Crew, as a result of they’re immortal and kick ass — as they infiltrate a villa swarming with guards, who they dispatch in one-on-one confrontations, largely by stabbing them to demise. They’re attempting to get to some Mr. Large, who seems to be an nameless dude in pink silk pajamas who will get destroyed like everybody else. This showy but meaningless appetizer of a sequence is Bondian in principle, however as quickly as Andy and her crew return to their headquarters, plotting no matter comes subsequent, the temper begins to veer nearer to that of a “Quick and Livid” film. Besides that “The Outdated Guard 2” doesn’t have that “Quick and the Livid” power. It’s extra like “The Languid and the Bothered.”

5 years in the past this week, “The Outdated Guard” was launched on Netflix, and I confess that it’s not precisely a film that has stayed with me. But as directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, it had extra get-up-and-go than this logy, morose, overly self-important and solemnly “meditative” second chapter. Prince-Bythewood didn’t return for the sequel. The brand new director is Victoria Mahoney, who doesn’t fairly appear to understand that she’s making “The Expendables Pt. 9” with self-healing limbs.  

“The Outdated Guard 2,” now that it’s formally holding down the middle of a franchise, takes the “Outdated Guard” mythology inordinately critically. It wouldn’t be the primary film primarily based on a graphic novel to take action. Greg Rucka, the author of the “Outdated Guard” graphic novel sequence, co-wrote the script of “The Outdated Guard 2” (with Sarah L. Walker) and is likely one of the movie’s govt producers, and he clearly desires us to really feel immersed within the excessive drama of those immortals, the drama being that they reside perpetually…till they don’t. They will get up on any given day and be taught that their immortality is gone.

That’s what occurred to Andy halfway by the primary movie, and now, as she copes together with her susceptible new standing, she’s besieged by figures from her previous — like Quynh (Veronica Van), the fierce warrior she fought alongside for 1,500 years, till Quynh was discovered responsible of witchcraft and locked in an iron maiden and dropped to the underside of the ocean. (That sort of chilled the friendship.) Quynh is now in search of vengeance on Andy and the world, a quest that has allied her with a brand new character named Discord, who additionally comes from the previous however is performed by Uma Thurman with a company hauteur that doesn’t precisely make her appear to be somebody who got here up by the Center Ages.

There’s a great prolonged shot the place Andy strolls by a passageway in Rome, strolling by folks from her previous because the place slowly turns again in time. We’re imagined to be seeing her recollections, and there ought to have been extra of that. However for all of the discuss of centuries passed by, “The Outdated Guard 2” seems like a time-tripping motion fantasy made on a budget. The problem of who’s immortal or not, and how one can flip immortal (or have that potential taken away), begins to look a part of some arbitrary film sport, like “Who’s acquired the detonator?” And the actors, trapped in what is simply too usually an empty somber talkfest, appear stranded in a approach that they weren’t within the first movie.

Theron is bodily commanding, and when Andy and Quynh face off in an alleyway the film briefly comes alive. However the comic-book cleaning soap opera of their ruptured bond is simply too summary to take maintain. KiKi Layne’s Nile nonetheless has her cleaning fierceness, Henry Golding performs a brand new immortal, Tuah, who isn’t given sufficient to do, whereas Matthias Schoenaerts, because the beleaguered Booker (who offered the group out and now desires again in), will get just a little too hangdoggy. Chiwetel Ejiofor, as Copley the CIA agent turned I-Crew ally, lends his crisp panache to traces like “It could be ill-advised to discharge any firearm within the neighborhood of the core.” The core, on this case, refers to a Chinese language nuclear reactor, hidden in Indonesia, that Discord has threatened to explode. It’s all a part of her stab at immortality, however by the top of “The Outdated Guard 2” it’s largely the clichés that appear to be dwelling perpetually.