Netflix's 'The Old Guard 2' May Be the Worst Movie of 2025
It’s been five years since The Old Guard exploded onto Netflix, introducing a squad of badass immortals who’ve been quietly saving the world for centuries. Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, the original felt less like a superhero movie and more like a genre-subverting, emotionally grounded action flick — equal parts pulse-pounding, heartfelt, and even slyly funny. It was one of the first great action films of the streaming era. The Old Guard 2 brings back much of the original cast, but not the original director, who removed her name from the project entirely. And honestly? Good call. No one should want their name on this mess. It’s a disastrous sequel that might just take the crown for worst film of 2025. The heart is gone. The humor is missing. The action is a chaotic blur. And the script? Practically nonexistent. What’s left is a clunky string of fight scenes duct-taped together by nonsense and inertia. It opens with Quynh (Veronica Ngo), an immortal who spent centuries trapped in an underwater coffin, being pulled from her prison by Discord (Uma Thurman), apparently the original immortal. If you can remember all the way back to the first film, Quynh was Andy’s (Charlize Theron) best friend and battle partner, seen in flashbacks. They have history. Then we’re tossed into an awkward, mostly pointless expository action sequence meant to reintroduce the crew: Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), Nicky (Luca Marinelli), Joe (Marwan Kenzari) — all still immortal — Andy, now mortal after losing her powers in the first film, and Copley, the former CIA agent who’s now basically their glorified tech support, a downright embarassing waste of Chiwetel Ejiofor. We know their respective status because Charlize Theron’s helpfully states as much between punches. We also meet a new immortal, Tuah (Henry Golding), who runs an underground library of immortality lore, because that’s a thing now. He helpfully explains that Nile (KiKi Layne), the rookie immortal from the first film, now has the power to injure another immortal and strip them of their immortality. They can then transfer that immortality to someone else. That random nugget becomes crucial when Booker decides he’s had enough of forever, uses Nile to pass his gift to Andy, and promptly dies like three scenes later. Meanwhile, Andy and Quynh reconnect, but it’s not a warm reunion. Quynh is still hurt that Andy didn’t save her from her watery tomb, and she’s now teamed up with Nile, who has inexplicably decided to blow up a nuclear reactor. Spoilers: it’s a trap. A trap designed to lure the immortals. But since letting a nuclear reactor explode would kill 10 million people, the crew heads in anyway. Cue more disorienting action. This is where Booker dies. Joe, Nicky, and Tuah are captured and frozen by Discord with what looks like liquid nitrogen. Quynh fights Nile, gets injured, and loses her immortality, and then Nile is taken by Discord. Turns out Discord lost her own immortality long ago, and the whole movie is just her convoluted attempt to harvest a new supply. She wants to transfer the powers of Nile, Joe, Nicky, and Tuah into herself. Naturally, this leads to yet another endless, exhausting fight sequence where Discord escapes in a helicopter with her prizes. At this point, I check the runtime and realize there are only 13 minutes left in a movie where almost nothing has actually happened. The final scene is a weird, tacked-on moment where Andy rummages through Tuah’s library looking for answers. She and Quynh — now mortal — have a nap, wake up, exchange some knowing glances, and decide it’s time to take down Discord. Then the movie just… ends. That’s it. No real resolution. No payoff. Just a wan sigh of a cliffhanger, wrapped in what feels like a $100 million prologue to a movie that may never — and probably shouldn’t — exist. Honestly, Netflix would be better off quietly scrubbing Old Guard 2 from its servers and pretending it never happened. It’s hard to fathom how a sequel to such a solid original could bring back the same cast, add Uma Thurman and Henry Golding, and still suck this hard. It’s terrible. It drags endlessly, yet nothing of consequence ever actually happens. The whole film plays like director Victoria Mahoney — whose résumé is mostly made up of middling, unremarkable TV dramas like Suits L.A. and Grey’s Anatomy — thought she could fix it all in post, only to give up halfway through. It barely qualifies as a movie. Movies tell stories. This is just 100 minutes of incoherent action, clunky exposition, and missed potential. There’s nothing here worth watching. It’s honestly baffling that Netflix greenlit the release — it’s not just a bad film, it’s a franchise killer. And The Old Guard was one of the streamer’s rare original franchises that held any promise. Now? It’s just rubble. And after a disaster like this, it’s hard to imagine we’ll ever see a third film. It’s even harder to imagine that anyone would want to.