Boys To Men
by Ed Owens

Promising is not the first word that comes to mind in relation to The Guardian, at least not to mine. The idea of coupling Kevin Costner (who has never quite recovered from the one-two punch of Waterworld and The Postman) and Ashton Kutcher (few will recognize him from his largely lackluster work in second-rate cinematic comedies, though most tweeners have certainly seen his MTV show Punk’d), directed by a man who has the ignoble distinction of having been fired from Schwarzenegger’s The Running Man, in what would appear to be a bad rehash of a bad clone of Top Gun doesn’t exactly scream compelling night at the movies.  Add a bloated running time of 2 hours and 20 minutes and you have a form of torture that even the President might consider overly extreme.

Of course, appearances can be deceiving, and, for the most part, such is the case with The Guardian.  The well-worn story of the battle of wills that ensues between a decorated rescue swimmer on the brink of forced retirement (Costner, showing he still has some chops, limited though they may be) and the brash young recruit he’s in charge of training (Kutcher, playing mostly himself) at the Coast Guard’s elite A-school has little if anything new to offer—they clash, they come to understand each other, they evolve, etc (stop me if you’ve heard this one).  But if the film paints by numbers with a broad brush, it at least manages to stay within the lines.  The film’s brisk pace and deft maneuvering keeps things light and quick, leaving little time to grouse or complain about this cliché or that stereotype (though the script by relative newcomer Ron L. Brinkerhoff is literally rife with both), and Andrew Davis keeps it all moving with an unusually steady hand (ably abetted by another relative newcomer, cinematographer Stephen St. John).

You’ll note that I said “for the most part,” and The Guardian suffers some nearly debilitating problems.  The films’ occasional stabs at profundity are ham-fisted and futile, wrapped as they are in circumstances so contrived, so profoundly forced, that they border on completely absurd.  In fact, whatever good will the film had managed to engender was damn near lost completely in the utter silliness of the last twenty minutes, a flood of ludicrous occurrences and even more ludicrous dialogue that were some of the funniest things I’ve seen and heard all summer.

Perhaps it’s the relatively low expectations, but The Guardian neither bored nor annoyed me…at least not until its ill-conceived resolution.  You won’t find anything new, innovative, or, for that matter, particularly thought-provoking, but as a trifling diversion, you could surely do worse.  Just be sure to leave before the film’s final reel.

A different kind of school is the focus of Todd Phillips’ School For Scoundrels, though the narrative also centers on the fragile relationship between a teacher and his pupil.  This time, the teacher is one Dr. P (Billy Bob Thornton), an uber-mensch completely devoid of anything even vaguely resembling morals who promises to turn his class of spineless boys into virile men.  His star pupil is Roger Waddell (Jon Heder), a literal doormat who stammers and faints in the presence of his attractive neighbor Amanda (Jacinda Barrett) and is constantly ridiculed in his job as New York City “Meter Maid.”

The premise is rich with promise, and the potential for really incisive satire is great.  Unfortunately, Phillips, who also wrote the screenplay (based on a 1960 British film of the same name which itself was based on a series of novels), seems of two minds about the material, posing some intelligent situations only to shoot for the lowest common denominator. The result is an uneven hodge-podge of silly slapstick (usually culminating in someone getting hit, shot, or shocked in the groin) and joking references to anal rape (any theories regarding a clever subtext of emasculation are undone by the fact that the film cannily avoids even the pretense of having a subtext) separated by lengthy setups deserving of better payoffs.

Another struggle for the film is tone.  While Phillips does occasionally leave the dark in dark comedy (though elements teeter dangerously on the brink of misogynistic), he is clearly uncomfortable letting the film go to some of its more natural extremes,  Characters are often guilty of inconsistency from scene to scene, largely in the interest of maintaining some level of audience sympathy while softening the blow.  Some films can succeed in spite of this (Mean Girls, for example), but School For Scoundrels fails precisely because of it.

Thornton is clearly phoning it in, not so much turning in a performance as showing up for work every day, while Heder seems utterly incapable of anything beyond the sort of goofy looks that made him a household name in the vastly overrated Napoleon Dynamite.  The characters themselves vacillate so rapidly and so often that you’re hard pressed to root for either.  Unfortunately, the cast of secondary characters doesn’t really help, with names like Ben Stiller, Sarah Silverman, David Cross, and Luis Guzman, among others, reduced to minor cameos that don’t even capitalize on whatever traits each actor brings to the table.