ENTERTAINMENT / Review
The Guardian
By Jessica Reaves
Updated: 2006-09-29 13:52
Admit it: Sometimes you get tired of art house movies starring actors who
take "their craft" very, very seriously. Sometimes you want to buy an
extra-large popcorn and settle in for a big budget Hollywood blockbuster
replete with entertaining explosions, undemanding dialogue and completely
unrealistic action sequences. If all that sounds like gloriously
uncomplicated fun, "The Guardian" is your movie.
Ashton Kutcher, keeping his smirk to a bare minimum, plays Jake Fischer,
a brash young Coast Guard recruit who's been selected to join the elite
squad of rescue swimmers. Fischer, who has clearly studied the work of
Tom Cruise in "Top Gun," shoots his mouth off at the first classroom
session, only to be confronted by instructor Ben Randall (Kevin Costner),
a legendary rescue swimmer who's carrying some serious psychic baggage.
Costner cuts down Kutcher with a decisiveness that would make Kelly
McGillis proud. A lot of this movie calls to mind Tony Scott's 1986
tribute to the Navy's best fighter pilots, from Fischer's swagger and
dark (putatively secret) history to Randall's refusal to let mediocrity
taint his exclusive unit. "Top Gun" allusions aside, however, "The
Guardian" stands solidly on its own in the action movie oeuvre, due
primarily to the white-knuckle rescue sequences, filmed off the Oregon
coast and in a meticulously constructed water tank.
Director Andy Davis, a Chicago native whose previous films include "The
Fugitive," is clearly adept at staging and capturing the gripping
adventures of men with something to prove. Kutcher, who admits having to
brush up his swimming skills for the role of Fischer, has toned down his
natural goofiness, emerging as a reasonably believable leading man.
Costner's weathered, crinkled looks are useful here, as Randall squints
meaningfully into raging rainstorms while contemplating the demise of his
marriage to Helen (Sela Ward, saddled with perhaps the movie's most
ridiculous line, delivered as she walks out on the inattentive Ben: "It's
time for me to save myself").
There is something enormously refreshing about the Ward-Costner pairing;
part of that is Ward's brisk, unsentimental delivery, but it's also to do
with the age appropriateness of the couple. Unlike in so many
male-dominated Hollywood films, the middle-age guy is still very much in
love with his middle-age wife. (Granted, the middle-age wife looks like
Sela Ward, but let's applaud progress where we can.)
We'll see whether "The Guardian" does for Coast Guard rescue swimming
what "Top Gun" did for fighter pilots. Certainly the Coast Guard has
never been considered the sexiest branch of the Armed Services, but this
movie does a service showcasing the pure, selfless, occasionally
foolhardy bravery of the swimmers who plunge into storm-lashed water to
drag poor souls to safety. It also showcases the tooth-gnashing
chauvinism and intermittent homophobia that seem to accompany any foray
into masculinity.
Eventually, as you probably could have predicted, the movie descends into
the sentimentality that haunts most of these "be all you can be" movies,
but in between the maudlin moments, Davis et al. deliver a sturdy popcorn
movie and a few genuine thrills. Not bad for a day on the high seas.
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