When The Old Guard, directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, blipped into availability on Netflix, five long years ago, it was at once a gift from the movie gods and an indication of what is broken about the current theatrical exhibition marketplace. At that moment, the outside world was still inhospitable, with movie houses standing out as an especially fraught space primed to collect COVID-19 pathogens for easy disbursement to popcorn-munching patrons. A big action movie with modest intellectual ambitions that was still made with a great deal of skin and care was a welcome reminder of what the decimated summer movie season was supposed to deliver. That’s the gift part. For the broken piece, The Old Guard was trapped in the Netflix model, COVID or no COVID. Prince-Bythewood’s dynamic spectacle cried out for a screen the size of a couple billboards and a sound system that could shake fillings out of molars. Instead, it was one more entry in a service that increasingly felt — and feels — like a nondescript media utility, pumping in product like it’s natural gas.

The Old Guard 2 picks up about six months after its predecessor. Andromache (Charlize Theron), who graciously answers to Andy, still leads a band of adventurers imbued with Wolverine-like healing powers that make them essentially immortal. Except Andy has lost those abilities, making her place at the head of the assault line especially precarious. When a person’s past spans centuries, there’s simply that much more that can come back to haunt them. So it is with Andy, who learns that her one true love, Quỳnh (Veronica Ngô), has reemerged following an extended imprisonment on the ocean floor. Complicating matters further is Quỳnh’s new traveling companion, the menacing Discord (Uma Thurman), who claims to be the first of their long-lived kind and is acting out a vaguely motivated scheme to kill off the whole lot of of them.

Adapted by Greg Rucka from a comic book series he wrote (Sarah L. Walker is co-credited on the screenplay for this second film), most of the details of The Old Guard 2 are sketchy and unconvincing. This is even the case as additional lore is heaved into the plot, largely provided by the new character Tuah (Henry Golding), an immortal librarian who presides over a cavern filled with tomes and shares nebulous theories about how their powers work. The film careens all over the globe, like a jet-set Bond outing with superhuman beings instead of a horny British spy, but there’s no lightness or freedom to it. The entirety of the film is made sluggish by the humorless trudging through tense-faced swapping of nonsense. Adding to the frustration, the story is nowhere near resolved by the time the end credits pop up. It’s less a cliffhanger and more of an arbitrary placement of a bookmark in the middle of a chapter.

The shrewd, steady direction of Prince-Bythewood is sorely missed. As she further proved with her Old Guard follow-up, The Woman King, Prince-Bythewood knows how to take a lot of potentially cumbersome parts and mold them into a compelling whole. Replacement director Victoria Mahoney shows no evidence of the same talent here. The action sequences — which are, of course, this film’s predominant reason for being — are particularly lacking, deadened by clunky staging and editing that pushes them close to indecipherability. If the original The Old Guard deserved more prominence, The Old Guard 2 lives down to its ignoble placement in the wilds of Netflix’s catalog.