Water damage
You’ve probably seen The Guardian before
OLD MAN AND THE SEA “You see, kid, the Titanic was this ship that … well that’s a whole other movie.” Kevin Costner and Ashton Kutcher tread water in The Guardian.
The Guardian is about Coast Guard rescue swimmers. It starts and finishes on a lofty note of heroic myth and legend. In between, it sports four lengthy and furiously intense action sequences involving dangerous rescues in high and stormy seas, all of which is almost enough to make you forgive the hackneyed nature of much of the rest of the film.
The title refers to a mythic archetype and to the best of the rescue swimmers, and in the movie it is 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 the film 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. Jake’s meet-cute romance with a foxy schoolteacher (Melissa Sagemiller) and Randall’s struggle to save his failing marriage to a brooding artist (Sela Ward) both come off as mere nods to the commercial requirements of love interest and domestic drama.
The mythic thread in Brinkerhoff’s screenplay raises the possibility that The Guardian will be an epic and ironic portrait of the savior/protector/guardian archetype—a saintly man of action whose genuinely heroic calling cuts him off from emotional relationships. Costner’s grizzled performance seems nicely suited to that impulse, but too much of the rest of the movie wobbles into less interesting territories.
Kutcher has mixed success in suppressing his natural comic smirk but overall proves adequate to the generic demands of an action movie role. Ward seems better than her role deserves, while Sagemiller is somehow appealing despite a role with an utter minimum of credibility.
But the most distinctive performance in the film may belong to Bonnie Bramlett (of erstwhile Bonnie & Delaney music fame). She plays Maggie, proprietor and chief entertainer in a blues bar frequented by the movie’s Coast Guardsmen, and her spate of dialog as a barroom Voice of Experience is enough to suggest yet another movie that The Guardian might have been but, alas, isn’t.
