Guarding Tess

Doug Chesnic (Cage) has the worst assignment in the secret service: he's bodyguard to former First Lady Tess Carlisle (MacLaine). Doug wants to be where the action is; Tess wants to go golfing every three or four years (usually in the dead of winter), with perhaps an annual trip to the opera for variety. Worse, she treats her bodyguards like butlers; she expects breakfast in bed, and no guns in the house. Hugh Wilson, creator of the Police Academy series, was once responsible for some modestly engaging TV sitcoms - and that's essentially what this is. He gets some amiable, low-key play out of the slippery ground between protocol and authority, the battle of wills between the determined, by-the-book agent and stubborn, independent Tess, but it's going nowhere slow until an implausible kidnap plot is hatched much too late in the day. Cage is on best behaviour here, but he's not an especially sympathetic performer. MacLaine more than keeps her end up (picking an outfit for an official affair, she opts for 'elegant disdain, yet sincere concern'); and her tetchy hauteur just about keeps the movie alive.