After years of production delays, Netflix and Skydance are finally poised to release The Old Guard 2, the Charlize Theron-led sequel to the 2020 adaptation of Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernández’s Image Comics series. Directed by Victoria Mahoney, the sequel reunites its immortal mercenary found family for another globe-trotting mission. Unfortunately, this time around, their greatest threat isn’t its new immortal big bad and its long-awaited grudge match. It’s the sequel’s narrative inertia that’s crushed under the weight of putting the cart before the horse to build a franchise.
Set several years after the events of the first film, The Old Guard 2 finds Andy (Theron) reckoning with her newfound mortality. Alongside Nile (KiKi Layne), Joe (Marwan Kenzari), Nicky (Luca Marinelli), and James Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Andy’s team now faces a formidable new threat in Discord, a shadowy figure played by Uma Thurman, who claims to be the world’s first immortal. Wielding knowledge that could unravel the very fabric of their eternal existence, Discord aims to dismantle everything Andy and her comrades have fought for over centuries to safeguard humanity. In a bid to stop her, the team turns to an old comrade, Tuah (Henry Golding), hoping his insight into the mythos of their immortality will hold a key to ending Discord’s plan.
Understandably, the film presents itself as a blockbuster showdown between Theron and Thurman—a battle between two of Hollywood’s legendary action heroines that reads like a pop-culture fan fiction come to life. However, their showdown, while serviceable, ultimately feels like the undercard, both in terms of spectacle and emotional weight. The real main event is the long-awaited reunion between Andy and Quynh (Veronica Ngô), her once-intimate comrade who spent centuries entombed in an iron maiden at the bottom of the sea and finds herself aligned with Discord. While Andy’s confrontation with Discord brings sparks, it’s her reconciling with Quynh’s festering fury and unresolved emotional damage that ignites the film’s most compelling tension—in the form of a vendetta five centuries in the making.
The Old Guard 2‘s action sequences—ostensibly the franchise’s calling card—are strangely limp this time around. Despite some inventive staging in its early goings, the film’s momentum quickly fades, giving way to jittery editing and disjointed camera work that rob pivotal immortal-versus-immortal fights of their impact. The much-touted showdown between Theron and Thurman, along with the emotionally charged clash between Nile and Quynh, bears the brunt of this breakdown. Instead of crescendoing into operatic spectacle, these battles fumble with continuity lapses and what feels like competing takes that were either left in the editing bay or arbitrarily stitched together. The film’s entire final act, rather than delivering catharsis, plays like a placeholder for whatever might come next—an unfinished bridge to a sequel that’s still a pitch rather than a promise.
And therein lies The Old Guard 2‘s biggest flaw: it’s too preoccupied with laying track for a hypothetical third chapter to finish the one it’s actually telling. Instead of delivering a fully realized, emotionally satisfying sequel, the film plays like a feature-length prologue that constantly signals its meditative importance without doing the necessary groundwork to earn it. Subplots, such as the friction between Nicky and Joe or the reintroduction of excommunicated team member Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), function less as meaningful drama and more as artificial bloat, highlighting the film’s uneven narrative urgency.
Even the film’s most promising emotional arc with Andy and Quynh’s fraught reunion, which simmers with centuries of silence, betrayal, and unresolved longing as a proverbial layup for the sequel to slam dunk, hits like a technical free throw, hobbled by the inflated lore drops and aggressive sequel baiting that foul up the film’s pacing. What could’ve been a tight, character-driven sequel instead dissolves into a middling bridge to a trilogy that laughably hasn’t earned its next step despite how visibly proud the film is of its cliffhanger.
What lingers after The Old Guard 2 are fragments of stronger ideas—moments of grisly body horror from its immortal brawls, inventive flashes of choreography, and themes of mortality, guilt, and redemption that shimmer faintly before drifting out of focus. The film seems too anxious to complete a thought before pivoting to unravel and undo the previous film’s climax, all in service of constructing a grander narrative that never actually materializes in its presentation. Long before the credits roll, it’s painfully clear the film has no intention of delivering any semblance of resolution found in its final act, but a rough sketch of what the film aspired to be is tucked away in what’s either studio exec meddling or, worse yet, a script that failed to rise to the occasion.
In its eagerness to pave the way for what comes next, The Old Guard 2 forgets to finish the act it’s in, leaving fans parsing microexpressions, filling story gaps with headcanon, and wondering whether the real climax got lost in edits or outsourced to fix-it fanfiction.
The Old Guard 2 streams on Netflix on July 2.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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![Census Proposal Would Stop Counting Undocumented Immigrants—and Ignore Race and Sexual OrientationThe US Department of Commerce, which oversees the Census Bureau, is circulating a proposed rule that would cease the collection of demographic data on racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people and prevent undocumented immigrants from being counted in the 2030 census, according to documents viewed by WIRED.The decision could have far-reaching implications for federal funding, particularly in states where there are substantial numbers of racial and ethnic minorities, as well as on immigrant communities across the country.The proposed rule, which is being circulated across government agencies for review, says the census will eliminate questions about race and sexual orientation “to protect from any distortions created from the inclusion of personal questions.” The memo also states that “illegal aliens (among others) should not be included in the apportionment count, they are not true inhabitants, members of the body politics [sic], or persons with ‘usual residence’ in the United States.”This would likely require the reintroduction of a census question about a respondent’s citizenship. During Donald Trump’s first presidential term, Republicans attempted to add a citizenship question to the census for the first time since 1950. The effort was struck down by the Supreme Court, 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the Court’s then-larger liberal bloc on the grounds that the justification for adding the question was “contrived.” The decision did not, though, find that citizenship questions are inherently unconstitutional.The Department of Commerce did not reply to requests for comment.“This is about the Voting Rights Act,” says Danah Boyd, a professor at Cornell University who studies the census, referencing the landmark voter protection legislation that the Supreme Court dismantled earlier this year. Eliminating the collection of these data, she says, would make it difficult to make basic assessments, like whether a congressional district is predominantly made of minorities.“If we don’t know certain things, we can’t challenge them politically,” says Boyd. “If we don’t know that certain peoples live in a particular geography, we can’t say, ‘Oh my gosh, here’s some massive inequality.’”Republicans and the Trump administration have long taken aim at the census. More recently, members of the Trump administration have attacked a little-known statistical method called “differential privacy,” which is used to prevent census data from being used to reidentify individual respondents, claiming that it makes the results inaccurate. In August 2025, Republican representative August Pfluger made another attempt to reintroduce a citizenship question on the census, sponsoring a bill called the COUNT Act, and in October, Republican senator Jim Banks of Indiana published a letter to Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, writing, “There is a credible argument that the framers of the Constitution designed the Census to cover lawful inhabitants and not those who are present illegally.”Census questions are set between two and three years in advance of the actual survey, based on priorities set by the administration. The data from the census inform everything from the apportionment of congressional seats to federal funding that is allocated based on the size of a population.An employee at the Department of Health and Human Services, who asked to remain anonymous because they are not authorized to speak to the press, tells WIRED that “many HHS programs use Census data to appropriate funding. Removing undocumented individuals from the census will cause localities with high numbers of those populations to lose critical federal funding.”The employee says that removal of racial categories could specifically impact Native populations, which sometimes receive specialized funding. “Some programs use the ‘American Indian or Alaska Native’ category from the Census to make determinations of grants set aside for Tribal entities,” they say.#Census #Proposal #Stop #Counting #Undocumented #Immigrantsand #Ignore #Race #Sexual #Orientationus census,immigration,undocumented immigrants,race,lgbtq+](https://i0.wp.com/media.wired.com/photos/6a7630b55d2ebc1c5247b509/191:100/w_1280,c_limit/GettyImages-157580450-edited.jpg?ssl=1 "Census Proposal Would Stop Counting Undocumented Immigrants—and Ignore Race and Sexual OrientationThe US Department of Commerce, which oversees the Census Bureau, is circulating a proposed rule that would cease the collection of demographic data on racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people and prevent undocumented immigrants from being counted in the 2030 census, according to documents viewed by WIRED.The decision could have far-reaching implications for federal funding, particularly in states where there are substantial numbers of racial and ethnic minorities, as well as on immigrant communities across the country.The proposed rule, which is being circulated across government agencies for review, says the census will eliminate questions about race and sexual orientation “to protect from any distortions created from the inclusion of personal questions.” The memo also states that “illegal aliens (among others) should not be included in the apportionment count, they are not true inhabitants, members of the body politics [sic], or persons with ‘usual residence’ in the United States.”This would likely require the reintroduction of a census question about a respondent’s citizenship. During Donald Trump’s first presidential term, Republicans attempted to add a citizenship question to the census for the first time since 1950. The effort was struck down by the Supreme Court, 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the Court’s then-larger liberal bloc on the grounds that the justification for adding the question was “contrived.” The decision did not, though, find that citizenship questions are inherently unconstitutional.The Department of Commerce did not reply to requests for comment.“This is about the Voting Rights Act,” says Danah Boyd, a professor at Cornell University who studies the census, referencing the landmark voter protection legislation that the Supreme Court dismantled earlier this year. Eliminating the collection of these data, she says, would make it difficult to make basic assessments, like whether a congressional district is predominantly made of minorities.“If we don’t know certain things, we can’t challenge them politically,” says Boyd. “If we don’t know that certain peoples live in a particular geography, we can’t say, ‘Oh my gosh, here’s some massive inequality.’”Republicans and the Trump administration have long taken aim at the census. More recently, members of the Trump administration have attacked a little-known statistical method called “differential privacy,” which is used to prevent census data from being used to reidentify individual respondents, claiming that it makes the results inaccurate. In August 2025, Republican representative August Pfluger made another attempt to reintroduce a citizenship question on the census, sponsoring a bill called the COUNT Act, and in October, Republican senator Jim Banks of Indiana published a letter to Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, writing, “There is a credible argument that the framers of the Constitution designed the Census to cover lawful inhabitants and not those who are present illegally.”Census questions are set between two and three years in advance of the actual survey, based on priorities set by the administration. The data from the census inform everything from the apportionment of congressional seats to federal funding that is allocated based on the size of a population.An employee at the Department of Health and Human Services, who asked to remain anonymous because they are not authorized to speak to the press, tells WIRED that “many HHS programs use Census data to appropriate funding. Removing undocumented individuals from the census will cause localities with high numbers of those populations to lose critical federal funding.”The employee says that removal of racial categories could specifically impact Native populations, which sometimes receive specialized funding. “Some programs use the ‘American Indian or Alaska Native’ category from the Census to make determinations of grants set aside for Tribal entities,” they say.#Census #Proposal #Stop #Counting #Undocumented #Immigrantsand #Ignore #Race #Sexual #Orientationus census,immigration,undocumented immigrants,race,lgbtq+")
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