Rating: 3.5 Stars
The following review contains spoilers.
Overview:
Occasionally, throughout human history, a warrior is killed in battle, but does not die. These warriors have vivid dreams of each other that only stop when they come into contact. Eventually, with no forewarning, they may lose their ability to heal from any wound, their “immortality” suddenly gone.
We start by being introduced to four of these immortals, who have been friends and colleagues for hundreds of years by this point. They work as mercenaries, trying to only pursue causes that they feel are just. They accept a job from a former CIA contact to rescue a group of kidnapped schoolchildren in Sudan, but when they arrive on the scene they’re ambushed.
The mission was a ruse to prove their immortality and hopefully capture and deliver them to Merrick Pharmaceuticals, a company specializing in life-extension, where they will be held captive and experimented on indefinitely. Somehow, the soldiers hired to capture these immortals were not briefed on their potential immortality, and every single one of them turns around and finds something else to look at for a while, and when the immortals “wake up”, they slaughter the soldiers and escape.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, a new immortal is “born” when she’s killed in action but doesn’t stay dead. Now the immortals have a twofold mission: track down the CIA contact and try to find a way to regain their anonymity, and find this new immortal and bring her into the fold.
Best Parts:
The action scenes, particularly the one-on-one fights, are terrific. Charlize Theron and KiKi Layne both do an admirable job and come off as entirely believable. Once Theron’s Andy realizes her time is up and she’s no longer immortal, I liked the way the others would kind of circle around her in the final conflict to catch any bullets that may have struck her.
Generally just a nice-looking, well-paced movie, with good performances. I liked Joe and Nicky from the group as well. There are even some notable moments of cleverness, which can be a rare thing in action films, especially in Andy and Nile’s confrontation on the smuggler’s plane.
Worst Parts:
I didn’t really buy Booker’s betrayal, nor his subsequent reversal of his betrayal. It wasn’t clear if he was supposed to be working with the CIA agent, Copley, the entire time, or only decided to betray the group shortly before he actually did so. If the former, why wouldn’t he just not kill those soldiers back in Sudan and try to get “captured” then? If the latter, why not at least raise the possibility of voluntarily working with Merrick to these people that he’s been intimate friends with for centuries before literally shooting one of them in the back?
Which brings me to Merrick himself, the cartoonishly evil young CEO. It’s almost like they had to make him as repulsive and evil as possible to desperately try to stop the audience from saying, wait, maybe they should work with scientists to see if anything in their biology could be used to help mankind? Maybe that would be a more effective way to be of service than occasionally helping free some random hostages? And to put the cherry on top, they give Copley a big, wacky conspiracy board that shows that, not only have they been using their powers for good all these years, but the people they rescue go on to have children that are double-plus super-good. So actually they’re on a mission from a higher power, Quantum Leap style, to roam the world helping people and making the world a better place, you know, eventually, and so it’s much better they just keep doing that than try to cure boring cancer or whatever.
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