The Guardian

The Guardian is about Coast Guard rescue, and the title refers to a mythic archetype and to the best of the rescue swimmers, linked most conspicuously to Ben Randall (Kevin Costner), a veteran rescue swimmer and Coast Guard legend who is transferred, under protest, to duty training rescue-swimmer recruits. In that task, he becomes a somewhat conflicted mentor to Jake Fischer (Ashton Kutcher), a gifted and similarly conflicted young recruit. Although it manages to invest a certain amount of dramatic emotion into the film’s aquatic cliffhanger sequences, Ron L. Brinkerhoff’s screenplay is largely a rehash of clichés and gimmicks from the training-camp and service films of an earlier era of Hollywood entertainment.