Cut to commercial! Cut to commercial!

Rating: 6/10 (14 July 2013)

***SPOILERS*** Kevin Costner as ex secret service agent Frank Farmer looks genuinely board stiff as his role demands him to be guarding the body of singer and actress Rachel Marron, Whitney Houston, as her bodyguard in "The Bodyguard". Coaster or Farmer walks around looking so deadpan throughout most of the movie that he seems to be suffering from a serious case of shell shock from his previous job as a secret service agent. It's a habit that he picked up over the years guarding both Presidents Carter and Regan in him being able to blend in with the furniture or background in him remaining inconspicuous, to any attempted assassins, on he job. Taking on an assignment at the insistence of his good friend Mr. Dewaney, Bill Cobbs, to be Miss Marron's personal bodyguard the company that he surrounds herself with get so intrusive in him doing his job that he almost quits before he begins. It's Rachel's sweet looks and bubbling personality that keeps him on the job guarding her and also the fact that those in her entourage of flunkies and hanger on being so completely incompetent in doing their jobs that makes him stay.
We and Farmer know right away that someone out there is trying to do Rachel in but that fact is kept from her by those around her that makes Farmer's job that much more difficult. Acting as if she doesn't have a care or fear in the world Rachel doesn't realize that her life and body, the body that Farmer is guarding with his life, is in serious danger. It's only much later when Rachel gets a disturbing pone call, on her private phone number, that she finally gives in and lets Farmer do his job protecting her life. It's her obsessed fan and stalker who's planning to whack her at the biggest moment in Rachel's life when she's to accept the Academy Award for best actress with over a billion people watching the great event live and on TV all over the globe.
***SPOILERS*** The love angle in the movie doesn't quite pan out with Farmer and Marron never really clicking in their love scenes that come across mechanical and not genuine at all. Farmer for one is so intense in all of his scenes that showing affection towards Rachel seems out of character for him in the movie. It's only in the last few moments that Farmer gets his act together in realizing who's out to knock off Rachel that he really seems to care for Rachel and tries to save her life even at the expense of his own. But by then she's so turned off by his almost zombie or robot like action that she almost allows her intended killer to do her in by not believing or responding to Farmers frantic attempts to save her life.
Both Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston as Frank Farmer & Rachel Marro did their best to make their parts in the movie work and the final payoff with a by then a disgraced, in letting things get out of hand, Farmer saving Rachel's life which saved the film from being total disaster. It was sad that the film "The Bodyguard" in a way predicted its star Whitney Houston's actual death some 20 years later in 2012. It was then just like in the movie Whitney faced death this time in her hotel bathtub, not from an assassin's bullet, just before she was to receive a Grammy for her music like an Academy Award for her acting in "The Bodygurad". But this time in real life not in the movies the outcome was sadly a lot different.