I liked it a lot, it’s a well done mix of action and depth. It’s much sadder than I would have guessed before watching, but it has a reason, which is not always the case. Every sad story have a deep reason to be told, and I liked that a lot. It’s quite rare to find reasonable stories. Many times action movies have sad moments only as a brief explanation for all the action, like 'they killed my wife so now I'm gonna kill them all'-end of plot.
This story is about fate, basically.
I’ll explain that with the details of the story:
Andromaca di Scizia, Andy for her friends, is the leader of a small group of warriors. They are extremely skilled, but are not affiliated with any one kind of regulated group. They work for themselves and by themselves, but they are good and fight to help people.
We see them getting together, after who knows how long, for a new job. The others are three males, Booker, Joe and Nicky. They are told that a group of little girls has been kidnapped, and they want to save them, but when they arrive on the battlefield there are no girls, it was all a trap and they are greeted by bullets, lots of them. For a few seconds the four of them lie bloody on the ground, then they start breathing again and get up and kill all the soldiers there. The whole thing has been recorded, and now someone knows what they are, that they don’t die.
Somewhere else, a Marine named Nile is killed in action, a man sliced her throat. Despite the horror and desperation of her fellow Marines that saw her die unable to do anything, after she actually does not die, and her throat heals completely without a scratch visible, all of a sudden she loses all her friends and everyone looks at her with distrust.
(I know it’s a big thing, I know nobody can explain it, she doesn’t know what happened or why or how, I know and understand that it’s all mysterious and whatever, but still I can’t accept people acting like that, I just can’t, she is alive and that in my book is a good thing! She is a young, good and brave woman, who is alive and I’d be happy about that before everything else! )
We see that Copley shows proof of their existence to Merrick, the ceo of a pharmaceutical industry or something, and he wants them so study them and test on them and generally use them, and it is easy to understand that he did this after the pain of losing his wife. We know that he lost her recently, or maybe a year, and that probably shocked him into trying to find a miraculous cure.
Andy is fed up with it all, she’s tired and has lost her fire and her faith, she thinks nothing ever changes and nothing they do changes anything, that the world is only becoming worse.
Andy and the others have visions of her death/not-death, and realise that there is another one like them. Not at all a frequent thing, but now that they know about her, someone needs to go to her.
The men go track down Copley, the man who sent them into the trap, while she goes to get her in Afghanistan, and takes her away. Nile tries to fight, of course, so Andy shoots her in the head and then promises her answers. They board a plane to reach France where Nile meets the others.
Here we learn that Booker was the last one to join the group, in 1812. Before him, Jo and Nicky fought against each other in the crusades and killed each other many times before they became a couple. Andy is the oldest, but won’t tell her age. (Still, if she’s from Scizia is it really too far to say she might be around 2000 years old?)
She was alone for a long time, then she met Quynh (credits write it that way) and they fought together for a long long time, until they were captures during the witch hunts, and of course the fact that they didn’t die condemned them as witches, so to break them apart they took Quynh away and put her into a cage, an iron maiden it should be called, and thrown into the ocean, to drown and come back, drown and come back, and they say that it’s been 500 years now. Andy never forgot about her but even if they looked for her for years or decades, they never found her.
Andy also explains that they can indeed die, sooner or later, one day their injuries stop healing and that’s it. As Nicky puts it, they fight for what they think is right, and everything happens for a reason, and everyone dies when it’s their moment.
Soldiers attack them while Andy and Nile are talking outside. Jo and Nicky have been kidnapped. Booker is really badly injured, but makes it. Andy goes alone to kill the soldiers so that the three of them can escape capture.
I liked that when Nicky regains consciousness he instinctively answers in Italian :-D when he says something like I’m here wherever here is, and Jo answers in Italian as well, before they go on in English so everyone can understand them, soldiers and audience both.
Andy, Booker and Nile go to a cave where Andy has hidden lots of things. Booker tries to find Copley on his computer, and then he speaks to Nile. He remembers when he died, he went back to his family, but he could not get old anymore, so he saw his sons age and die, and when one of them got sick and suffered, he begged him to help and didn’t believe that he couldn’t and cursed him and cried, and it was very painful, so he suggests Nile not to go back to her family. Andy can’t even remember her mother or sisters any more, after so many years.
Andy finds out that a recent wound has not healed. She tells no one, and goes to a shop to buy something, and the girl working there helps her tend to the wound.
Booker says he found where they are, right outside London, and they move. Nile refuses to follow them inside, she says she doesn’t want to become like that. She doesn’t even know for what they are fighting, and she doesn’t want to become like Andy, and she thinks she still has years to be with her family before they’ll notice that she doesn’t age, so she stays behind. Andy gives her a gun and the car and Nile drives away, but then she notices that the gun was not loaded, and it was the gun that Booker handed to Andy, so Nile goes back to help her.
Andy and Booker enter the place alone, see Copley but get nowhere because Booker shoots her in the back. Booker says that finding out why they don’t die could also get them a way to end it, and that was what she wanted… but a better explanation to me is that he did it because he never got over how painful it was to see his sons die.
Only, now they realise that her wound is not healing, and try to help her, but Merry arrives with his soldiers and care nothing about the fact that she’s not immortal anymore.
Andy and Booker are taken to the lab to join the others. Nile arrives to Copley when they are away already, and to prove to him who she is she shoots herself in a foot (she could have said she’s one of them, but I guess this cut all protests). Copley shows her his extensive study of what the group, especially Andy given she’s the oldest, have done during the years. All the people she’s saved, and many times the children or grandchildren of someone she saved did something remarkable for the whole world. Nile understands now. He stays behind but she goes alone to save her. She learns pretty quickly how quick those men are to shoot, but of course they didn’t know about her being immortal as well, so she gets up and goes on fighting, and gets to them. The soldiers manage to injure her a few times, but she can heal and move on, so she frees them all - well, she goes to free Andy and then the others, and she tells Andy she’s seen all the good she’s done.
They fight all together. Andy has no intention of being protected, she goes forward as she always did. Long fight short, they kill everyone, (ok, Andy stopping a bullet with her fire axe was a bit too much) and then Andy uses her double-round-axe thing that I don’t know what it’s called on Merrick’s neck, then Nile catches him and launches herself out the window with him, from the penthouse. Then she comes back alive and they go away.
They decide that as a punishment for his betrayal Booker is to stay alone for 100 years.
Copley shows them all everything he found out looking only at the last 150 years, so the four of them (without Booker) tell Copley that he’ll have to cover their tracks and find them jobs.
This is the end of this story, but we are shown that six months later, a drunk Booker returns home to find Quynh in his house.
Andy - Charlize Theron
Nicky - Luca Marinelli
Nile - Kiki Layne
Booker - Matthias Schoenaerts
Joe - Marwan Kenzari
Copley - Chiwetel Ejiofor
Merrick - Harry Welling
Quynh - Van Veronica Ngo
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