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Geek Dad
06-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Dad
Review – Cheetah and Cheshire Rob the Justice League #1: Bad Girls, Bad Girls
Cheetah and Cheshire Rob the Justice League #1 cover, via DC Comics. Ray: It's been a while since Greg Rucka dropped a new project at DC, but right now it seems like every all-star who made their name here is coming back with something new to say – but this dark heist comedy is definitely a twist on Rucka's usual fare. This story focuses on two of DC's most infamous female villains – or antiheroes, depending on the story. Cheetah had a bit of a redemption arc in Tom King's Wonder Woman, but she's still struggling with her unnatural hungers. As the issue opens, she eats a corpse at a morgue and then nearly tears apart a random young man before fighting back and vanishing. Cheshire, meanwhile, has no such scruples. She's busy testing a new poison that makes people explode before heading off to her latest gig – assassinating a corrupt businessman. She even gives the henchmen a chance to walk away alive, because she's only here for the big man. Bloodshed. Via DC Comics. She's a professional, while Cheetah is the more emotional and passionate of the two, so their carnage-filled team-up here is a lot of fun. They casually get dinner after finishing the job, compare notes on their personal lives, and then Cheetah proposes the heist of a lifetime – robbing the Justice League watchtower for something called the Power Bank – an artifact that contains backups of every single power belonging to a member of the League. This is obviously one of the most valuable things in the world, and Cheshire is skeptical to put it lightly – but Cheetah knows exactly how to correctly pinpoint her insecurities and give her a way to rise above them and reach a new level of wealth and power. This first issue only gets us to the title, essentially, but it doesn't matter – between Rucka's clever writing and Scott's gorgeous, all-too-vivid art, these two already have me hooked into their mad scheme. To find reviews of all the DC issues, visit DC This Week. GeekDad received this comic for review purposes. Liked it? Take a second to support GeekDad and GeekMom on Patreon!
Yahoo
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Old Guard's Charlize Theron and cast on centuries-old same-sex love stories
The Old Guard movies teem with astounding action sequences from hand-to-hand combat to a daring helicopter rescue. But a pair of centuries-long same-sex love stories, platonic or otherwise, adds emotional heft and heightened stakes to these tales of a band of immortals fighting for humanity. Based on the graphic novels from writer Greg Rucka, The Old Guard (2020) delivered a love story for the ages between Marwan Kenzari's Joe and Luca Marinelli's Nicky while hinting at a deep connection between Charlize Theron's Andromache of Scythia (Andy) and Veronica Ngô's Quynh, who's been trapped in an iron maiden in the ocean for centuries. Henry Golding, Luca Marinelli, Marwan Kenzari, Charlize Theron, Kiki Layne in 'The Old Guard 2.'Courtesy of Netflix Spoilers ahead. In director Victoria Mahoney's The Old Guard 2, Uma Thurman, who recently played the president in the queer favorite Red, White & Royal Blue, stars as Discord (the earliest immortal) unshackles Quynh to reach the newest Old Guard member, Nile (KiKi Layne) through her relationship with Andy. With Quynh, who pervaded Andy's memories in the first film, free from her watery prison, a reunion between them, 500 years in the making, becomes a centerpiece of the sequel. 'It's truly been one of my top favorite relationships that I've ever been a part of in the development period because we get to explore it as a thought, really, in the first one. And it really served one purpose, and that was to just say that Andy is haunted by something, right?' Theron tells Out.' 'I knew that she was going to be a big part of it just because of how much we emotionally leaned on her for Andy's emotional story. And therefore, it was never kind of like this linear exploration. It's been this kind of searching and grabbing,' she adds. 'We've had to discover it in a way as we're going along. And to me, that is almost exactly who they are to each other. They had to do that same thing with each other. And since they haven't seen each other in 500 years, they're grabbing onto memories the way I can't even remember things when I was five years old. We make history, we remember it the way we want to.' A quick internet search turns up fan sites devoted to Andy and Quynh and their truly epic story. Andy wields a long double-sided axe, a labrys, an ancient Greek symbol of power adopted by lesbians in the 1970s (who can forget Corky's labrys tattoo in Bound?). Still the mystery of their relationship is a draw for Theron, who's starred in overtly queer roles in Monster and Atomic Blonde. 'I love that the two of them are coming together with all of that and that we don't get into the specifics. They just are. We're not underlining them. We're not saying who they are to each other, they're just living those circumstances,' Theron says. 'And I love those kind of relationships.' Uma Thurman as Discord in 'The Old Guard 2.'Courtesy of Netflix The first Old Guard film from Gina Prince-Bythewood released at the height of the pandemic in 2020, introduced the immortal love story between Nicky and Joe that included swoon-worthy speeches about their love. "He's not my boyfriend. This man is more to me than you can dream,' Joe says at the start of a romantic speech. They're back in The Old Guard 2, forever at each other's side, hundreds of years into their relationship. 'For me, it's a very rich connection. And whether the audience picks up the fact that they're lovers or soulmates or brothers or in my mind, it can have any of those qualities and doesn't necessarily have to be specifically one of those forms of sharing love,' Kenzari says. Luca Marinelli as Nicky and Marwan Kenzari as Joe in 'The Old Guard of Netflix Friendship among women and a mentorship between Andy and Nile deepens in The Old Guard 2 as well. Layne touches on the film's chosen family onscreen and off. '[Mentorship] it's something that the first film really started to set up, just kind of this beautiful journey that [Nile and Andy] go on of literally first starting off fighting each other and then Nile, I mean, sacrificing her life. She's immortal, but saving Andy and coming back for the team and really choosing the Old Guard as her family,' Layne says. 'We see that continuing in the second film, and seeing what she's learning. Nile is learning from Andy, and I get to learn from Char and learn from Uma this time around too.' Though Discord is The Old Guard 2's villain, she's imbued with a sense of ethics gone awry. Thurman says her character has a 'deep respect' for what 'Andy has created for herself…which is the ability to continue to connect and to have closeness with others and give her life meaning.' Existential questions of humanity are the themes of the film, Thurman says, but Andy and Discord face them from differing perspectives. 'They're just coming at the sort of pondering good and evil and losing faith and losing hope. … I think Discord is…is a little bit shadier or at a different point in her own struggle with giving up, losing hope, losing faith, and letting darkness consume,' she says. 'I think people go through that in their own lives.' is now streaming on .This article originally appeared on Out: The Old Guard's Charlize Theron and cast on centuries-old same-sex love stories
Yahoo
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Old Guard 2: Charlize Theron's delayed Netflix sequel slated by critics
After a difficult journey to the screen,The Old Guard 2 has largely been met with derision by critics. The original film, which stars Charlize Theron as an immortal warrior named Andy, broke Netflix records when it was released in 2020 during the pandemic. Last year, Theron revealed that a follow-up had completed filming two years earlier before facing substantial delays due to big leadership changes at Netflix. Speaking to Variety, Theron said: 'Netflix went through quite a changeover. We got kind of stuck in that and our post-production shut down, I think, five weeks into it.' The film, which like the first is adapted from his own comic books by writer Greg Rucka, finally arrived on the streaming service this week. The addition of Uma Thurman to the cast has been praised, but generally critics have been left underwhelmed. Writing for Robert Daniels opined that the film 'lacks any sizable reason to be invested in its existence.' He added that the sequel is 'an emotionally inert slog' that is 'burdened by Greg Rucka's dull and underdeveloped script. There isn't much of a story here.' In a Vulture review headlined: 'What the hell happened to The Old Guard 2?', critic Bilge Ebiri argued that the film suffered from 'a debilitating cheapness that keeps this picture from reaching its true potential.' Meanwhile, Shawn Van Horn of Collider felt the film was overburdened by exposition and a desire to set up a potential franchise. 'The whole plot is explained and told to us, rather than shown,' wrote Van Horn. ''Show, don't tell' is one of the most basic rules in storytelling, and it's frustrating that The Old Guard 2 doesn't follow this.' He also described the action sequences as 'shockingly tame.' The New York Times found more to love, with critic Brandon Yu singling out Thurman as 'a brilliant addition whose presence gives the right dose of pulp and gravitas to help set the tone of a grander mythology.' Yu continued: 'And yet, it's a shame how little she and Theron actually show up together onscreen. It's partly understandable. There's a lot of new stuff here, and ultimately The Old Guard 2 has a bigger picture and more long-term world-building — which is to say franchise-tentpoling — it's focused on setting up. 'You'd think that would be a bad idea for a sequel, looking at what's next when the challenge of making the next one is already so great. But it's confident enough that it never feels that way in the moment — only until the very end, when Thurman and Theron are duking it out, and it's delicious enough to feel too short.' The Old Guard 2 is streaming now on Netflix.
The Guardian
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Old Guard 2 review – Charlize Theron's delayed Netflix sequel is an incomplete mess
Even with our thick-of-Covid desperation for anything that felt big at a time when life felt too small, there was more to The Old Guard than the average churned out Netflix mockbuster. Released in the hell of July 2020, it came with the requisite boxes ticked (big star, international locations, franchisable setup) but felt closer to the real thing than most, proving to be a hit for those eager for escapism, scoring one of the streamer's biggest launches to date. But like many Netflix films, its cultural impact was negligible, popular for a weekend or three but failing to live on in any notable way after, consumed with speed and forgotten at a similar pace. A sequel was inevitable yet unnecessary, and while one was given a green light at the start of 2021 and started production in 2022, it's taken another three years to see the light of day. Not only does The Old Guard 2 bear the bruises of such a cursed post-production process but it's also weakened by such a distance from the first, forcing us to remember something most of us had resigned to the ether (it's telling that to promote the sequel, Netflix has recruited its stars to recap the first film). It's not as if we're dealing with a straightforward action flick either, the mythology of The Old Guard, based on Greg Rucka's comic book series, requires enough convoluted exposition for us to pull up the original's Wikipedia plot description to understand just what the hell is going on in the follow-up. Should something intended to be a summer lark really feel like such hard work? It's made mostly tolerable by Charlize Theron, an actor and a movie star we just don't see enough of and when we do, it's quite often not what we want to see her in. Theron, who gave us one of the greatest character studies of the 2010s in Jason Reitman's vastly underrated Young Adult, has decided to remain boringly unchallenged as of late, slumming it in flimsy franchise fodder (her last non-genre role was playing Megyn Kelly in 2019's dubious #MeToo dud Bombshell, although that could be conceivably classed as horror). She returns to play Andy, a once immortal warrior who (and I had to remind myself of this) was made mortal in the first film, a danger that should technically add suspenseful stakes to her extravagant fight sequences (but alas). This time around, an old comrade returns from centuries of punishment (Ngô Thanh Vân) and partners with a humanity-hating immortal (Uma Thurman) causing Andy and her team to take action. While it should, in an era of increasingly bloated runtimes, be a boon to have it all wrapped up in under 97 minutes (sans end credits, far shorter than the 125-minute original), The Old Guard 2 is a panicked rush to wrap things up, poorly developed and confusingly plotted, a swift and savage franchise-killer. Along with last week's M3gan 2.0, which bombed at the box office after a 2.5 year gap, it serves as a reminder to studios why speed and simplicity are both essential for sequels in an attention economy where films just don't have the same media footprint they once had. In the time it took to beat this one into shape, it seems like those involved have also forgotten what made the first one work, the replacement of director Gina Prince-Bythewood with Victoria Mahoney leading to a considerable drop in action sequence effectiveness while the original's rather groundbreaking queerness has now been almost entirely excised. The first film had a surprising, swooning kiss from immortal lovers played by Marwan Kenzari and Luca Marinelli, but this time around, their foreheads briefly touch instead. There's also a coy confusion over just what the relationship is between Andy and her one-time partner, who are gay in the comics, but are presented as, ahem, longtime companions here, the film acting as an amusingly abrupt end to Pride month. Theron is an actor who's tirelessly working even when the script isn't asking her to, but this is a waste of not only her but also a returning Chiwetel Ejiofor, as well as Thurman who has moments of slithering fun as the villain but she's used so sparingly, it's akin to a cameo role. The last act sets her up to be a bigger part in the third film but, slight snag here, there hasn't been any official confirmation of The Old Guard 3, something that might shock viewers given the baffling cliffhanger ending. It's not as if some b-plot threads are left dangling but instead, the entire film is left shoddily unfinished, a truly heinous decision that threatens to turn the series into the new Divergent (a cancelled fourth film leaves that franchise forever incomplete). Perhaps that might be for the best. The Old Guard 2 is now available on Netflix
The Review Geek
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Review Geek
The Old Guard 2 (2025) Movie Review – Better than the first movie?
Better than the first movie? It is a unanimous agreement that superhero films in the 2010s were dominated by Marvel and DC. And they were good. But following their descent into quick cash grabs and mediocre stories in the 2020s, the genre has been a free-for-all, from Snyder working on his Star Wars fanfic, Rebel Moon, to WB appealing to gamers with Mortal Kombat Legends. But Netflix seems to be trying its luck with Greg Rucka's graphic novels, The Old Guard. While the first movie had a quiet release during the pandemic, it gradually built an eager fanbase hungry for a sequel with that shocking cliffhanger. Well, their wishes have been fulfilled with the release of The Old Guard 2 in July 2025. The cast includes old and new faces such as Charlize Theron, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Matthias Schoenaerts, KiKi Layne, Henry Golding, Marwan Kenzari, Luca Marinelli, Veronica Ngô and Uma Thurman. Not to be outdone, the production has gone all out for the crew with Victoria Mahoney directing, Rucka collaborating with Australian soap legend Sarah Walker on the script, Oscar-nominated cinematographer Barry Ackroyd and editor Matthew Schmidt, who is a Marvel regular. As a quick refresher, The Old Guard follows a bunch of immortals, led by Andy, who go around saving the world and humanity from man-made dangers. In the first movie, they face an existential crisis, an innovative villain and centuries-old regret. The Old Guard 2 picks up where it left off with a now-human Andy, Nile, Joe, Nicky and Copley teaming up to get rid of powerful criminals. But trouble is afoot as Nile dreams of a strange woman wreaking havoc. Traps are set but the team races to her willingly as this new danger is none other than Quỳnh, the immortal Andy failed to save 500 years ago. Seeking revenge against the immortals and humanity for abandoning her, Quỳnh ropes in the team's exiled member, Booker and a mysterious woman who may be more powerful than all of the immortals combined. The sequel definitely gets a glow-up courtesy of the much bigger budget and much bigger talents attached to it. The first movie was quite choppy and amateurish with MTV-like treatment, action scenes turned into music videos, awkward pauses, cringey jokes, inorganic monologues and limited set direction. But the story had heart and the cast carried the movie, and we are glad that Netflix saw the potential. Because The Old Guard 2 is bigger, bolder and much smoother. From the get-go, you can see where all that money has gone with the first action sequence set in a luxurious Croatian mansion and a chase along the Riviera involving vintage sports cars. Instead of the tight close-ups of the first movie, The Old Guard 2 has an abundance of master shots for the action, so that we can enjoy the visuals when the jokes don't land. And now it is clear, comedy isn't Greg Rucka's forte. But that's fine since this isn't a comedy movie. The stakes feel higher since Andy is not immortal anymore and the very human Copley is involved in the well-choreographed action as well. And it is such a relief that the music is spaced out with a firm hand. There is a variety of original music highlighting the characters' mood and classical folk music of each era the immortals lived in, along with the expected fun EDM tracks to add the adrenaline rush to the fight sequences. This is not the only thing that makes the sequel better. Since the characters are all established, the writers are able to focus on building their camaraderie and different dynamics. We get more of Quỳnh and her love-hate dynamic with Andy. The honeymoon phase of our co-dependent lovers, Nicky and Joe, is over and there is trouble in paradise. We also learn more about the immortals, their lore and back stories. Uma Thurman's mystery woman is the Bill of this world. Like the big bad baddie in her iconic movie, Kill Bill, she plays the villain who stays on the sidelines for the most part in The Old Guard 2. It adds suspense while also setting up a storyline with a larger role for her in a third part, should it get greenlit. Sure, there are drawbacks, some minor and some major. There is a lull before the second act of the movie. The timeline is still quite hazy on how everyone jets all over the world in the blink of an eye since they don't have superspeed. Quỳnh looks perfect when rescued despite being trapped for 500 years. And Andy barely flinches when fighting against tons of enemies who don't hold back since they think she is immortal. But the biggest problem is that we still do not learn much about the immortals, except for Andy. This time, it is worse since the previous movie's protagonists, Nile and Copley, are relegated to the background. There are no subplots, just one race to the finish line. This does give the movie a crisp pace but in exchange, the supporting characters suffer. The large ensemble cast does their best with what they are given, from Golding constantly looking like he has a huge secret to Marinelli channelling his inner jilted lover. Then there's Ngô playing Quỳnh as Andy's ex which adds depth to her revenge. However, the focus is solely on furthering the plot with little regard for character development. This could have been resolved with some introspection or a dilemma involving the immortals. Or The Old Guard 2 could have easily distracted viewers and kept everyone happy with more of Thurman and her sword-wielding prowess. Read More: The Old Guard 2 Ending Explained
