Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 22 - The Old Guard

This week Barry berates me for trying to stay current by choosing as a topic the new Netflix sci-fi action movie The Old Guard, starring Charlize Theron. In the episode we break down the movie and consider what worked (not much), what didn’t (a lot), and why. We also dive into the unending mystery of who actually shot this movie.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 22 - The Old Guard

Thanks for listening!

©2020

The Old Guard: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Just an idiotically dreadful piece of movie junk.

The Old Guard, directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood and written by Greg Rucka (based on his comic book of the same name), tells the story of a group of centuries old “immortals” - warriors who cannot be killed, and their leader Andromache, as they navigate a hostile modern world. The film stars Charlize Theron as Andromache, with supporting turns from Mathias Schoenaerts, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kiki Layne and Harry Melling.

As the coronavirus cinema void continues unabated, Netflix has attempted to meet movie demand with some of its original content…such as the action/sci-fi film The Old Guard.

The Old Guard is not a movie I would ever venture out to see in the theatre even in the best of times, but Netflix now has leverage over me since I’ve not been able to get my cinema fix for over four months now…and so…I succumbed and rolled the dice on The Old Guard.

To be fair, my bet on The Old Guard wasn’t entirely a long shot as Charlize Theron has proven herself to be a formidable action movie protagonist…the glorious Mad Max: Fury Road and the entertaining Atomic Blonde being proof of that. The movie also boasts two actors I have long admired, Matthias Schoenaerts and Chiwetel Ejiofor, among its cast. So while I didn’t have my hopes up, I also wasn’t expecting it to be abominable.

Boy was I wrong.

The Old Guard is an awful movie.

It is also as ineffectively directed as any major motion picture you’ll come across.

Director Gina Prince-Bythewood, whose only claim to fame was the egregiously overrated Love and Basketball (2000), lacks any and all requisite skill or talent to tackle a film of this nature. It is stunning to think that this movie had a $70 million budget and yet at best looks like a flimsy Sci-Fi channel throwaway movie and more often than not looks and feels like amateur hour at the local cable access station.

The action sequences are dull, derivative and repetitive. The visuals are stale and flat. The character development and performances are insipidly vapid. Oh…and the story is utterly imbecilic…just completely nonsensical and idiotic. But beyond that it I guess it was ok.

One mystery I have yet to figure out is why the film has two cinematographers in its credits. Barry Ackroyd and Tami Reiker are both listed in the credits, but having two DP’s is a surefire recipe for disaster. One can’t help but wonder if one of them started the film and was replaced. Ackroyd is a serious guy, having received an Oscar nomination and winning a BAFTA for The Hurt Locker. Reiker is much less accomplished, but the notion that Ackroyd was potentially mentoring her doesn’t hold water as she has been working in the industry for over twenty years. Regardless of why there are two cinematographers, the bottom line is that whoever shot this movie ought to be ashamed of themselves.

As for the directing, you might think that since Prince-Bythewood is not good at action sequences she might at least be good at drawing solid performances from her cast. You’d be wrong.

Make no mistake, Charlize Theron is a terrific actress and a potent action movie presence, but in The Old Guard she not only looks terrible but lacks any dynamism or magnetism at all. I understood what she was trying to do with her character - create a deeply wounded soul battered by the slings and arrows of such an egregiously long life without end, but she is so poorly photographed and directed she ends up being nothing but dour, shallow and unconscionably boring.

Kiki Layne, last seen giving an uneven performance in the equally uneven If Beale Street Could Talk, plays a new member of the Immortals gang and is embarrassingly lackluster and awkward. The wooden Layne is woefully miscast as she is painfully uncomfortable with the action sequences and seems unable to even remotely connect with the dialogue or drama of the less physically demanding scenes.

Both Matthias Shoenaerts and Chiwetel Ejiofor are two enormous talents wasted as their characters are so poorly written as to be incoherent.

And finally, Harry Melling gives a dinner theatre murder-mystery level performance as the bad guy from big pharma. Good Lord, all Melling was missing was a mustache to twist as he laughed maniacally.

What is frustrating to me is that the plot of The Old Guard could potentially be turned into an interesting cinematic venture, but Netflix handed to keys to what they thought might be a new signature franchise to Prince-Bythewood and she (and Reiker/Ackroyd) proceeded to fill the gas tank with maple syrup and paint the interior with raw sewage. The car may still be able to run after this…but it’s gonna need a lot of work before that can ever happen.

In conclusion, The Old Guard isn’t just a missed opportunity, it is a cinema abomination. Only movie masochists need ever glimpse a second of this dreadful film. If you want to see Charlize Theron in all her action movie glory, skip The Old Guard and go watch Mad Max: Fury Road. You’ll be glad you did.

©2020

Woke Hollywood Gets Burned By Charlie's Angels Box Office Bomb

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 28 seconds

WOKE HOLLYWOOD GETS BURNED BY CHARLIE’S ANGELS BOX OFFICE BOMB

The new Charlie’s Angels movie is more proof that woke feminist films are box office poison.

Charlie’s Angels, a reboot of the old 70’s tv show and the early 2000’s movies that stars Kristen Stewart, of Twilight fame, along with relative unknowns Naomi Scott and Ella Balinski, hit theaters last weekend with blockbuster ambitions and a defiant “girl power” message. Not surprisingly, the film opened with a resounding thud and fell decidedly flat as evidenced by its paltry $8.6 million box office.

Elizabeth Banks, who wrote and directed the movie, unabashedly declared it to be a feminist enterprise filled with “sneaky feminist ideas”. 

Banks says of Charlie’s Angels,

“One of the statements this movie makes is that you should probably believe women.”

The films star, Kristen Stewart, said of the movie, “It’s kind of like a ‘woke’ version.”

Charlie’s Angels’ failure is just the most recent evidence that woke feminist films are box office poison. The film’s financial floundering comes on the heels of the cataclysmic, franchise-destroying performance of another big budget piece of pro-feminist propaganda, Terminator: Dark Fate, which sank at the box office like an Austrian-accented cybernetic android into a vat of molten steel. Hasta la vista, woke baby.

There have been a plethora of like-minded girl power movies released in 2019 that have produced similarly dismal results at the box office.

One issue with many of these ill-fated woke films is that, like previous feminist flops Ghostbusters(2016) and Ocean’s 8, they are little more than remakes of male movies with females swapped in. These derivative films are the product of a craven corporatism entirely devoid of any originality or creative thought.

For example, the social justice geniuses in Hollywood decided this year it would be a good idea to remake two movies that no one wanted remade, Mel Gibson’s What Women Want (2000) and Steve Martin and Michael Caine’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1998), except this time with female leads. To the shock of no one with half a brain in their head, What Men Want with Taraji P. Henson, and The Hustle, with Rebel Wilson And Ann Hathaway, resoundingly flopped.

This year’s Book Smart, directed by Olivia Wilde, was little more than a rehash of the 2007 Jonah Hill and Micheal Cera smash-hit Superbad. Replacing Hill and Cera with two teenage girls as the protagonists in the formulaic film did not inspire audiences, as indicated by the film’s anemic domestic box office of $22 million.

Original movies with feminist themes fared no better than their re-engineered woke cinematic sisters. Late Night, a feminist comedy/drama starring Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling, made a paltry $15 million domestically, while the painfully politically correct Charlize Theron vehicle, Long Shot, raked in a flaccid $30 million.

As evidenced by these failures, audiences of both sexes are obviously turned off by Hollywood’s ham-handed attempts at woke preaching and social justice pandering. The movie-going public is keenly aware that these woke films are not about entertainment or even artistic expressions, but rather virtue signaling and posing within the Hollywood bubble.

The female stars involved in these failing feminist projects, in front of and behind the camera, have a built in delusional defense though that immunizes them from their cinematic failures…they can always blame misogyny!

The woke in Hollywood are forever on the search for a scapegoat to relieve them of accountability, as it is never their fault that their movies fail. In the case of these female-led movies, the women involved never have to own their failures because they reflexively point their fingers in horror at the angry, knuckle-dragging men, who out of misogynist spite don’t shell out beaucoup bucks to go see their abysmally awful girl power movies.

Elizabeth Banks got an early start in the men-blaming game even before Charlie’s Angels came out when she told Australia’s Herald Sun,

“Look, people have to buy tickets to this movie, too. This movie has to make money. If this movie doesn’t make money it reinforces a stereotype in Hollywood that men don’t go see women do action movies.”

Of course, men will go see women in action movies, Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel being two prime examples of highly successful female action movies, but fear not, Elizabeth Banks dropped some feminist knowledge to counter that uncomfortable fact when she said,  

“They (men) will go and see a comic book movie with Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel because that’s a male genre.”

So even when men go see a female led action film, they are only doing so because it is a “male genre”, got that?  What a convenient way to avoid responsibility…with Elizabeth Banks it is heads, she wins, and tails, men lose.

Banks preemptively blaming men for not being interested in seeing Charlie’s Angels is also odd because she has also openly stated that “women…are the audience for this film” and that she wanted to “make something that felt important to women and especially young girls”. And yet it isn’t just men staying away from Charlie’s Angels in droves, but everybody…including women!

What the feminists in woke Hollywood need to understand is that men and women will go see quality female-led movies, but they need to be good movies first and feminist movies a very distant second.

The problem with Charlie’s Angels, and the rest of these feminist films, is that their woke politics is their only priority, and entertainment value and artistic merit are at best just an after thought, if a thought at all.

My hope is that Hollywood will learn from the critical and financial failure of Charlie’s Angels and the rest of 2019’s feminist flops and in the future will refrain from making vacuous and vapid woke films and instead focus more on quality and originality and less on political correctness and pandering. Considering the continuous cavalcade of Hollywood’s atrociously dreadful girl power movies this year, I am not optimistic.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2019