Release Date: September 29, 2006

(out of 4)

Once in awhile, a movie comes along that fails to follow the simplest basic rules of filmmaking. "The Guardian" is a movie that doesn't to adhere to the basic rules of story structure. It’s an uneven mess that doesn’t know how to prioritize its main story from its subplot stories, and it’s got about four endings. This new action-adventure starring Kevin Costner and Ashton Kutcher does have the good intent in portraying the realistic heroics the U.S. Coast Guard, and its got its impressive brief segments, but as a whole it is exasperating movie to watch in full.

The crummy and clichéd screenplay uses "Top Gun" and "An Officer and a Gentleman" as models, with a buffed Kutcher playing a new school recruit and a veteran gruff Costner playing the new school instructor. There’s a clichéd romance between Kutcher and a local beauty (Melissa Sagemiller) whom insists that they keep their relationship casual, but it becomes, gee, more serious than they expected. Kutcher is a young hotshot that needs to be cooled down, and Costner’s got lessons to learn about humility and to know when it’s time to call his career quits.

In a labored subplot, Costner is trying to hold onto his marriage to Sela Ward ("Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights"). She wants to quit on him, and we take her word that he’s been tough to live at because there is spare exposition in this film. Even the daring sea rescues have no exposition – people are drowning and the Coast Guard arrives to save people in time. The drama of the film has very little meat per se, but at least the action at sea does have its "Perfect Storm"-inspired moments.

Kutcher has his moments too. He’s really a bad actor that has made a least a fighting attempt on-screen to prove himself seriously. In other words, there are less bad Kutcher-style moments in this film than in previous Kutcher efforts. Really, Kutcher isn’t the most miscast actor in this cast. John Heard ("Home Alone," "Pollock"), a regular at playing stock characters like dads, is out of his element here in playing a Captain at the Coast Guard training school.

This is a movie that is obviously attempting to be reverential for the rescue teams to make up the Coast Guard, and it seems to know its swimming drills, but the film feels obligated to cook up the most cockeyed melodrama at every left and right turn. Not only is Costner a legendary rescue swimmer, he’s a damned one that can’t forgive himself for the last mistake he made where people died around him at sea. But now he’s got a Coast Guard staff that is questioning his teaching tactics when all I could think was: How is there anything remotely wrong with his methods? Despite a gratuitous use of grainy digital video for one particular sequence, the strenuous pool exercises that Kutcher and recruits withstand are among the few truly noble and engaging scenes of the movie. OK, it doesn’t appear to be as physically draining as the Navy Seals boot camp scenes in "G.I. Jane," but it does at least suggest the agony of surviving the class.

Surviving the last repetitious hour is another thing. Director Andrew Davis (who directed one of my all-time favorite movies, "The Fugitive") does himself no favors by directing a film that fails to project any of his personal filmmaking style. No gliding camera shots, and OK, a little of that elliptical editing technique he uses by overlapping dialogue scenes over forwarded action. But it’s a rare technique used, and for most of the time, he can’t seem to get this movie going. Once the training scenes are out of the way, it’s waterlogged melodrama.

Training sequences of course are used to prepare us for “action” out at sea, and "The Guardian" attempts to do everything it can to dazzle us, but it’s a wash-out of repeated actions on top of repeated actions. And contrived, too. So contrived that the shocking casualty at the climax feels nothing less than arbitrary. But it’s the repetition that keeps the movie slowed down.

What we saw from Costner’s rescue scenes from the beginning of the movie are now duplicated, in the form of the same EXACT scenario, are now performed by Kutcher once he becomes an official rescue swimmer for the Coast Guard. Costner gets another chance, by way of EXACT same circumstances from earlier, to redeem his professional failures into successful heroics. The movie poses a provocative question about how does one decide who lives or who dies. By the end, it’s hard to care either way because the film has insisted to treat us like dummies.