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.