A Fascinating View

Into the Coast Guard

I've never reviewed a military movie before (though several films, such as "The Pacifier" and "War of the Worlds" are in some way entangled with the military). "The Guardian" is thus the first movie I've reviewed to deal specifically with a branch of the armed forces. The Coast Guard -- as examined here through the interaction between a semi-retired field expert and a group of students -- ultimately came across to me as an utterly fascinating institution.

Ben Randall (Kevin Costner) is a member of the Coast Guard in Alaska, and is losing his wife because she's given up competing with his job. He ruminates on this with his buddy Carl (Omari Hardwick) as they set out in a helicopter to rescue the crew of a cargo ship going down in a storm.

Ben is sent down to load people into the rescue lift. Things turn horrible in an instant as a shipping container clips the end of the helicopter, which goes down in a fireball. Only Ben and Carl survive the crash, and although they both make it into the rescue raft dropped by an emergency plane, Carl dies.

Ben is temporarily pulled from active service by his superior and, given the choice, ends up teaching classes at a Coast Guard training school. I'd like to pause here, as I often do, to gouge the living daylights of an obscure aspect of the film. Today, that aspect is The Special Individual.

The Special Individual is my term for the main character in any film where he (or she) is in no significant way distinct from those around him or her. These people always end up being markedly different, of course--that's how the movie makers make the characters endearing--but there's always a certain amount of suppressed disbelief about the process After all, Luke Skywalker would have been dead less than half way through "Star Wars" if he hadn't, by chance, left his adoptive family's ranch at just the right time.

The example I think of here is the class of students in Ben's training school. They pull in on a bus, and right away the camera focuses on this one relatively modest looking fellow, and I know the rest of the story is committed to him.

The fellow on the bus quickly distinguishes himself as Fischer (Ashton Kutcher, who does a much better job here than in last week's film), the single most dogged member of class 55-06. Fischer is a swim champ--and he and Randall spend the rest of the movie revising evaluating each other against the backdrop of heroism. The only classmate of distinction is Hodge (Brian Geraghty), a man now in his third attempt at passing the course.

I really did get a feeling of brilliance from this movie, which never overplays the dramatic element. It demonstrates greatness with modesty, and the action sequences are interspersed perfectly with the plot.

Bonus points for the bar bet, the brick moving exercise and panic training with Hodge. Kevin gives it four and a half stars out of five.