The Guardian

Last night I have the dubi­ous pleas­ure of watch­ing The Guard­ian, the new film star­ring Kevin Cost­ner and the appar­ently semi-famous Ashton Kutcher. For the most part, the film is typ­ical of the its genre — crusty old timer meets troubled new recruit, tough train­ing sees some fail but the under­dog get through, new recruit comes good, old timer seeks redemp­tion, etc. This film is Top Gun with heli­copters and diving gear, or Officer and a Gen­tle­men without, well, either the officers or the gentlemen.

For the most part it is fine, mildly amus­ing action-stuff. Up until the last, third or so, which is prob­ably the most asin­ine ending to a film I have seen in a very long time. The prob­lem is that after deliv­er­ing an unspec­tac­u­lar mil­it­ary genre film, The Guard­ian sud­denly lurches in search of some deeper mean­ing, some greater explor­a­tion of the human soul and it is here where the wheels really come off. As a pre­dict­able action film it’s per­fectly fine, if not for a Friday night, then cer­tainly as a DVD or plane movie. As a com­plex romantic drama and explor­a­tion of the deeper reaches of loy­alty and hero­ism is bor­der­line laughable.

The inter­est­ing thing for me is that this is a film one could, if inclined to do so use as a spring­board for a dis­cus­sion about themes like ment­or­ing, or redemp­tion — the kind of stuff that might interest theo­lo­gians of cul­ture. How­ever, it is seemed fraught to do that with a poor film, par­tic­u­larly one like The Guard­ian that has so clearly been revised with a view to add levels of mean­ing that the nar­rat­ive simply can’t sus­tain. Watch it for a lesson in the kinds of films we should only ever quote with extreme care and circumspection.

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