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A Masterpiece!

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Continuing my plan to watch every Kevin Costner movie in his filmography in order, I come to 2006's The Guardian Plot In A Paragraph: Jake Fischer (Ashton Kutcher) a high school swim champion, enrolls in the U.S. Coast Guard's "A" School, where legendary rescue swimmer Ben Randall (KC) teaches him some hard lessons as he believes he is there for the wrong reasons.There is absolutely nothing new here, we've seen everything before. Mainly in An Officer & A Gentleman, The Guardian is as cliché as it gets. But I for one find it an enjoyable movie.Almost every cliché is ticked along the way, (I think the only one they missed is Kutchers love interest not being KC's daughter) but that doesn't meant it isn't good. Both leads put in good performances and are well backed up by Neal McDonough, Clancy Brown, Brian Geraghty and John Heard.As for the characters, KC is grumpy, Kutcher is arrogant, Geraghty is suitably shy and nervous, but it's McDonough who I believe is what an instructor would be like in a place like this.Slated upon release, I can't recall reading one positive review, but I enjoyed it then, and I still do now, it's one both of my kids like too. It's one of the movies that if the kids walk in a room and I'm watching it, they will sit with me and watch the rest of it.

First, I spent over 3 years at the busiest Search and Rescue station in the Coast Guard, NAS Reserve New Orleans. Keven Costner played a Master Chief on SAR missions, that virtually never happens. The chiefs went home at 4:00 and the grunts took over. And during the day the ready crew for SAR missions was always E-6 and below.Sometimes the senior officers went on SAR missions as pilots but never senior chiefs. I was an E-6 when I got out after logging over 1000 hours as a crewman. I will agree with others unless things have changed there was never any hurah just hard work and lots of it. We often worked 36 hours straight and put peoples lives at risk because of absolute fatigue! I was involved in multiple life saving missions as well as missions to pick up those that did not survive.It was an amazing experience but I also no longer miss wondering if I will live or die during a mission. I sent a MayDay and also flew on another mission that declared and emergency. In the 4 months before I got out 3 helos crashed and there was one survivor out of all the crashes, 11 men giving their lives. Also, there was never any melodrama when we were making life and death decision, we fully understood our responsibilities and it was always very professional when we were forced to make those decisions!FYI if you watched the movie my number was about 6 or 7, it was a hard number to think about and decide. But that was in about 3 years and 3 months.

This was a terrific movie and one of my favorite Kevin Costner movies. In a nutshell, it is about training for life in the U.S. Coast Guard. Costner plays a Coast Guard legend, who, after a tragic and traumatic accident at sea, gets assigned to teaching and takes hotshot recruit Ashton Kutcher, who had been a swim champion (and who has a similar incident in his past) under his wing as his protégée. The bulk of the movie deals with the classes, swimming, rescue scenes, and the recruits' going out at night. I thought those scenes were hilarious, especially when Kutcher tries to pick up chicks.I think the best parts of this well-done film were the rescue scenes (which were brilliantly filmed), the character development, the classroom scenes in the pool, and the interactions with Costner and Kutcher. I also loved the legend of "The Guardian. Anyone who loves the stars will love this movie.*** out of ****

It was around 2005 onwards that films started to decline overall. We saw a great reduction in daring, but novel plots and Hollywood started churning out films with reused plots, predictable endings, moderate acting and "crosses the Ts" style of film making, producing an ultimately forgettable product. This spanned across action, comedy and drama films and since then, we're seldom treated to an interesting movie.The guardian is not an interesting movie. Amazingly, the film had a large budget though it was difficult to work out how this was consumed, given most of the film was shot in and around an indoor pool.The teacher is brilliant with a distinguished career, but battling his demons arising out of a tragic event (yawn) and a cocky new recruit with bad attitude and loads of talent (yawn) who ends of walking the straight and narrow to become a true hero everyone knows that he is (yawn).Costner and Kutcher were fairly well matched and acting was reasonable given the material, but the cardboard cutout nature of the plot was just such as a disappointment that it overshadowed any positives.Even if you saw it at the time it came out, I bet you couldn't remember what it was about these days.