Film

The Guardian (2006)

Director: Andrew Davis

Movie review

From Time Out London

Kevin Costner finally acts his age in this decidedly patchy US Coast Guard drama, and is spot-on as the lead rescue swimmer in Alaskan waters, who’s demoted after a tragedy and not happy to be training the service’s newest intake. Which is where the very wooden Ashton Kutcher comes in, decorative but unresponsive as the swim-team golden boy who’s forsworn Ivy League scholarships to become a lifesaver and needs to be taken down a peg or two. Anyway, the rest you can sketch out on the back of an envelope, but quite a large envelope, since director Andrew Davis has a lot of dreary domestic asides and training regime malarkey to plod through before he can get to the rescue sequences. They’re persuasive enough to remind us of the real-life heroism behind the story, but the film nullifies the effect through wearying over-length and a whole string of endings flailing to give both senior and junior leading men their due.

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