The Guardian

A Coast Guard rescue swimmer (Kevin Costner), the sole survivor of an accident at sea that wiped out his entire team, recovers from the trauma by serving a stint at a training school in Seattle, where he gruffly takes the star student (Ashton Kutcher) under his leathery wing. Performances are excellent—especially from Kutcher, looking physically fit and more in command of the screen than he’s ever been before—while director Andrew Davis and his visual-effects crew bookend the school scenes with some riveting sequences of rescues in stormy seas. But Ron L. Brinkerhoff’s script is hackneyed, derivative and absurdly overlong, meandering past three or four endings before settling on one ripped directly from An Officer and a Gentleman—which seems to have inspired much of the rest of the movie as well.