Old Hollywood Gets Slick Touch

Date: January 17, 1993
By Julie Sanderson

From Sunday Mail (QLD)
Submitted by: Larry A.


THE BODYGUARD (M)
Directed by Mick Jackson.
Kevin Costner, Whitney Houston, Michele Lamar Richards, Ralph Waite


IF the stars don't get ya, the music will. This is one slick, romantic and largely enjoyable movie put together with loads of glamor and not too many heartaches about the plot.

Whitney Houston gives this story about an Oscar-nominated singer and her workaholic bodyguard all that it deserves - and how. It's a surrender as sweet and shallow as a Kylie video. We should be so lucky.

Houston, as beautiful, spoilt pop singer Rachel Marron, is in dire need of a minder after receiving a series of nasty threats.

Enter Kevin Costner as Frank the bodyguard, ready to prove that dancing with Whitney is less artistically challenging, but likely to be more lucrative than dancing with wolves.

Don't expect Kevin "Mr Credibility" Costner to upstage the saccharine gloss of this movie.

He's just along for the ride in a script which gives him only half-a-dozen good lines, but lots of macho pouting to do.

With all their supposedly scorching bedroom scenes cut from the movie's final draft, Frank the bodyguard is left to tinker with the security surveillance equipment while utilising a range of expressions which seem to have been borrowed from Grumpy the dwarf, folding his arms and refusing to smile even when Snow White tickles him with a feather.

For all its faults there is an enormous poppy appeal to this movie which was made from a 20-year-old script by Lawrence Kasdan.

It was penned long before his screenwriting success with movies such as Raiders Of The Lost Ark and The Big Chill, but bears his charming touch.

It's old-fashioned Hollywood ideas given slick modern Hollywood treatment in a neat package which works - a glamorous leading duo, great upmarket soundtrack and an excellent supporting cast which includes top-notch performances from Michele Lamar Richards as Rachel's jealous sister and Ralph "Mr Walton" Waite as Frank's kindly old Dad.

But don't expect much tension. Everything that you think will happen does and the real perpetrator of the crime is immediately obvious to anyone with the IQ of a carrot, yet it's all done with such charisma, a little wit and so much style that only a real shrew would list all its faults.

Everyone will know the answer and everyone will still enjoy finding out for sure, probably even forgiving the ridiculous holes in the plot (which include a spectacular exploding-boat-in-the-wilderness scene), the outrageously tacky fake-Oscar scene and the "watch this and weep" ending.

The one real mystery, which will likely never be solved, is why Frank's hairdresser hates him so much.