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Victoria Mahoney's approach to movie-making has been inspired by Christopher McQuarrie.The Old Guard 2 director and Christopher - who is a frequent collaborator with Tom Cruise - are good friends, and Victoria has revealed how the filmmaker has influenced her approach to shooting action scenes.Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Victoria shared: "McQ is a very dear friend. "I will say that I am a child of Korean action movies, so my connection to emotion and action comes from the amount of Korean films that I watch. Korean filmmakers and stunt teams do it so well and so honestly and so plausibly and so feverishly that it is just ingrained. So I actually didn’t know we shouldn’t be doing that. "What McQ did for me — by way of our geeky spitball discussions that are endless year upon year — is [making sure] you preserve the emotionality in action as much...

Charlize Theron dedicated "1,000 percent of herself" to The Old Guard 2.The 49-year-old actress teamed up with Victoria Mahoney to make The Old Guard 2, and Victoria has praised Charlize for her whole-hearted approach to the project.The director told Deadline: "The thing about Charlize is, she comes hard, and she dedicates 1,000 percent of herself to every sequence, whether it’s trauma or action, and it’s visible. "People know that, for many years we’ve all seen it, and we’ve witnessed it. But there is something really electrifying to see it up close in person, and she doesn’t leave anything on the field, as we say."Victoria hailed Charlize as the "engine on the Old Guard franchise".The director also suggested that the Oscar-winning actress actually helped to lift the performance levels of the film's cast and crew.She explained: "I worked in pre-production for months with our fight choreographer,...

Spoiler Alert: This article contains details of Old Guard 2, which debuted on Netflix on July 2.

“One day, you’ll understand, every minute is a step toward death,” Uma Thurman’s vengeful Discord says in Netflix’s long-awaited and much-delayed The Old Guard 2.

Now, immortals and ex-immortals have their own way of looking at the march of time, but there is no denying the action-packed Charlize Theron-led franchise is alive and kicking. Directed by Victoria Mahoney, the Greg Rucka and Sarah L. Walker-penned sequel brings Theron’s no-longer immortal Andy up against a foe in Discord that may truly be more than her match. The layered film also brings a true blast from the past in the raised-from-the-sea Quynh (Veronica Van) – who has some very personal scores to settle with Theron’s infamous warrior.

Having weathered a global pandemic, regime changes at Netflix, fires, Hollywood strikes and more...

A welcome surprise after months of Covid lockdown and upended release schedules, The Old Guard came along in 2020 to demonstrate that hard-charging action and emotionally textured drama need not be mutually exclusive. Its well-developed lead characters could handle themselves with Mma fight moves, knives, swords and Bronze Age axes. But they also had soulful interiority, their immortality sentencing them to existences of aching solitude and loss. Arriving five years later, Netflix’s sequel has most of those elements, but it’s missing the secret sauce — Gina Prince-Bythewood’s commanding direction.

Charlize Theron and KiKi Layne return as, respectively, the ancient — though still gorgeous, toned and nimble — warrior and the powerful fledgling immortal, along with a solid supporting cast that includes Marwan Kenzari and Luca Marinelli as Joe and Nicky, the gay couple whose relationship spans centuries. Joe’s unabashed declaration of love and the passionate kiss they shared in the...