Far from the first one. While it was not any kind of masterpiece, it was entertaining and presented an interesting group of characyers.
This second part is dull as hell. It starts ok and then it (and the audience) falls asleep. Pretty much half of the movie is about manifesting drama out of nothing by lingering on facial expressions for waaaay toooo loooong (stare at face, stare at the opposing face, don't say a word, just stare, repeat with the next scene, and no movement do not move while this happens, stop the world from revolving so everyone can stare and really analyse those expressions in detail). The actors do ok but in my opinion they are very limited by this style of directing where every line on dialogue is delivered when the world basically stops during thesw scenes (this seems to be very common these days). I do not need to stare at faces or hear their names repeated every other sentence. This just feels lifeless and kind of unnatural.
While some of all this babbling provides more backstory and perhaps a hint of world building, it is a very small part of the movie. Some things are also repeated like six times in a row when they were already obvious. "So there's this myth that tells about a thing that happens when a specific immortal does this other thing to another immortal." (points to a random book with a couple of colorfull images). The othe guy basically replies, "Aah... so that happened because they did that things in the last movie". Oh yeah dudes, please repeat it again, please, I didn't already figure it out ages ago. I literally skipped ahead in some scenes because they took waaayyyy tooo looong. I would have much rather seen much more of the lore and spent much more times digging up the past, like actually researching things instead of just walking into this cool ancient library which apparently contained all the lore and history of the immortals. There was even this whole encyclopedia set about The Old Guard and it was stolen, which we see in a useless dreamclip - useless because it just shows them being taken and nothing about why or how that moment came to be, and also the librarian says this afterwards just to make sure that we got it. The whole movie kind of skips over everything that would have served as a great basis for a real sequel. Could have even been a prequel that would have given much more context and depth to everything. Now this is all super simple and apparently just a matter of walking into a library that almost no one knew existed (except the main character and the librarian, obviously).
There is rather little action and most and when it starts the movie actually ends. Someone probably yelled "We're running out of film in two minutes!" and they just cut it short in the middle of a scene almost. Perhaps the third one is supposed to give Uma Thurman's cahracter some substance because here she is pretty much useless. And maybe it will explore the past more in general. Who knows. I'll still watch it but I won't be expecting it wven nearly as much as I did this.
