The Guardian: Critic Reviews

The brave women and men who serve as United States Coast Guard Rescue Swimmers perform courageous, lifesaving feats every day. Clocking in at a Waterworldly 139 minutes, The Guardian catalogs every one of them.

The Guardian is an action movie, a basic training movie, a swaggering sea adventure, a home front melodrama and an inspiring tough-love heroic teacher fable.

Kutcher may soon be ready to anchor a Hollywood sea voyage. But for now, he's still a touch out of his depth.

The movie begins to overload its frail reed of a structure with giant sloppages of cliches from other movies, some so bad it's almost comical.

The Guardian is bookended by two technically complex rescue sequences, but the movie sorely lacks momentum. So it's up to the cast to transport us, and that doesn't happen either.

A popcorn flick like this does best when it sticks to shallow waters.

The Guardian is the kind of inspirational movie that Hollywood made about the Army, Navy and Marines during World War II. Now, with inspiration in short supply, it's the Coast Guard's turn.

Valor does emerge in The Guardian, but often is eclipsed by an effects-driven star vehicle.

It's a pleasure to watch Costner. He continues to operate in a comfort zone where aging and foxiness co-exist. (Harrison Ford, take note.)

The Guardian isn't the worst aqua-themed movie of Kevin Costner's career. Not with Waterworld in his rearview mirror.

In between the maudlin moments, [director] Davis et al. deliver a sturdy popcorn movie and a few genuine thrills. Not bad for a day on the high seas.

Impossible tests of endurance: check. Grinding down of cadet's arrogance: check. Phony romance between cadet and sassy babe: check. Fatherly benediction, the newly minted hero bursting with pride: check. Boo-rah!

Costner is suitably Costneresque -- that is, low-key, stoic, and capable of a wry turn here or there.

A decade after the commercial and critical flop of Waterworld nearly drowned his career, Kevin Costner is back to sea in The Guardian, and this time his dignity remains afloat.

While it's not completely waterlogged, The Guardian is more than a bit soggy. It begins efficiently familiar and ends with a series of splashes that seem like desperate dogpaddling.

Like a light out on the ocean, you can see everything coming for miles in The Guardian.

Formulaic but so well-made that you choke on the thrills in spite of yourself.

A shrewdly updated version of classic (and not-so-classic) military-themed pics about grizzled, blunt-spoken vets who transform cocksure hotheads into coolly efficient professionals.

If you're going to drop $70 mil or so on a movie, you should go ahead and blow $9.99 on the deluxe tier of cable service so you can see how such characters are created on Rescue Me.

A workmanlike story, an unusual setting, a game cast and a righteous message kind of get lost in the film's excesses. And an imbalance in the leads hampers this by-the-book service-academy drama.

The Guardian does the job required: nothing more, nothing less, and nothing fancy.

Both veteran director Andrew Davis and writer Ron L. Brinkerhoff know a cliche when they see one... so they dutifully point them out to us in this predictable tale of a much-decorated rescue swimmer passing the torch to a promising new recruit.

Kutcher and Costner have a kind of visual chemistry that's just as elusive as the other kind. And the connection and contrast between them remind us that Hollywood isn't as forgiving of older male actors as we like to think.