Houston, Costner team up to make Bodyguard bomb

Date: November 26, 1992
By John Griffin

From The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec)
Submitted by: Larry A.


"God, this is so embarrassing," gushes Whitney Houston midway through The Bodyguard.

She's talking about dating the help, but it could be about making her screen debut in one of the worst films of the year.

Houston plays Rachel. Like Houston, Rachel is a pop-music superstar. Unlike Houston, Rachel is also an actress.

Not only is she an actress, she is an actress on the verge of winning an Oscar. For best actress.

It is but one of many exceedingly unlikely cinematic realities we're asked to accept in a romantic thriller that is actually being hyped as a major studio release. The name Kevin Costner has something to do with the hype. Kevin stars as, that's right, the bodyguard. Kevin is also credited with the film's co-production.

When you associate the words Costner, star and co-producer, do not think Dances with Wolves. Think Kev's earlier gambit on both sides of the camera. It was called Revenge, and it laid serious claim to the title of Worst Movie of 1990.

There are so many things wrong with The Bodyguard, it seems trite to start with bad hair. But we have to start somewhere, and Costner's faux Steve McQueen 'do is a clue to the film's larger problems.

Apparently, Lawrence Kasdan (Big Chill, Grand Canyon) wrote the screenplay to The Bodyguard almost 20 years ago. He wrote a part he hoped would appeal to the late, great McQueen.

McQueen, you may recall, was a man's kind of man. You know - reactionary, isolationist and sexist. He may not have been racist, too, but Kasdan's script gives him the common ruling-class prejudices of the time.

Costner idolizes McQueen and all that square-jawed, denim-shirt, macho mystique, which must explain why he associated himself with a project so blatantly out of synch with the '90s.

Costner plays Frank Farmer, an obsessively professional bodyguard who quit guarding the U.S. president when he happened to be off- duty the day the Prez was shot. Farmer couldn't stand knowing he wasn't there to save him.

He can be convinced to guard Rachel, however. Money changes everything. Trouble is, the headstrong singer doesn't want the protection.

What Rachel doesn't know is that her life is in danger.

Forget, if you will, the fact that every major star in the arts has been armed to their capped teeth since John Lennon was assassinated.

Overlook the fact no manager or press agent in their right mind would expose their golden goose to trouble the way Rachel's handlers do here.

Then avert your attention from what everyone in the audience knows within five minutes of waltzing into Rachel's under-secure compound - the psychopath is a member of her own entourage!

The Bodyguard suggests none of Rachel's people can figure out the obvious because they're ignorant. They just happen to be mostly black, too.

Thank God for great white hope Farmer, who turns Rachel's tough heart to mush, teaches the idle folk how to care for their star, spurns Rachel's sexual offers with avuncular superiority after an initial indiscretion, dispatches the enemy and rides off into the sunset.

But not before a series of clunky scenes in nightclubs, C & W bars, Florida convention hotels and - the piece de resistance - an entire reel of what looks like Dances With Wolves out-takes dropped into the middle of the movie.

(You could hear the question marks forming during last week's premiere as the crowd attempted the sudden mental leap from tropical Miami glitz to rugged winter wilderness.)

In case you're thinking The Bodyguard is a bad 20-year-old movie starring someone who looks a bit like Steve McQueen, read all about the brave interracial clutch between Costner and Houston, and know that, yes, this is a bad 20-year-old movie.

Anyone who believes mixed-race affairs are cutting edge in 1992 hasn't been outside since the '70s. They are a simple fact of life and love, though there's nothing resembling either in the rigor- mortis relationship between Houston and Costner.

Were there no precedent for a film so completely out of it about pop culture, The Bodyguard would have created a greater shock. But Costner has already gone on record as an acute observer of the current scene.

"So what did you think of my show?" asked Madonna backstage, in a scene from the sex-and-gender-bending exercise that was her 1991 documentary Truth or Dare.

"It was neat," replied Costner blandly.

To which the Material Girl delicately turned around, and stuck her finger down her throat in the time-honored gesture of disgust.

Maybe she'd seen an early copy of The Bodyguard.