Overrated

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Cop Christine McKay (Rothrock) is hot on the trail of a counterfeiting ring and is working the case with her partner and fiancé Nick Taylor (Teague). Behind the operation are the criminals David (Miano) and the super-evil Nina Lindell (Denier). After some tragic events perpetrated by Nina, Christine gets kicked off the force and hits the skids. She ends up living in a trailer with her dog Flash, who she has conversations with about her life. But she vows revenge on the sinister Nina at any cost. Christine ends up taking a bodyguard job for a rich, cocky playboy named Lawton Hobbs (McVicar). Nina was his ex-girlfriend and so there's a personal stake there. Christine will have to use all her skill as a Martial Artist to get to the bottom of this tangled web. Can she do it? We really enjoyed this Rothrock vehicle. PM rarely disappoints, and with a team of PM mainstays both in front of and behind the camera, you really can't lose. Director Munchkin applies the same techniques with Rothrock as he did with Don the Dragon Wilson or Jeff Wincott in the past, and the result is an entertaining movie with plenty of shooting, chases (of the car, helicopter, boat and horse varieties), Martial Arts fights, and Cynthia Rothrock getting off some cute catch phrases after she beats up her assailants.Marshall Teague gets to show off his range - we hadn't seen him play the charming cop before this. We mainly know him as the evil dojo master/teacher from the great A Dangerous Place (1995). Robert Miano pops up constantly and we know him and love him, he does his standard good job. A nice surprise was Lydie Denier as the baddie-ess. She was cold, heartless, and dastardly, and a perfect enemy for Rothrock. Christine's Captain in the movie was female but looked and dressed a lot like David Coverdale. And while McVicar did a decent job as the Hugh Hefner-like lothario, we felt Bruce Campbell could have also played that part.Guardian Angel is also filled with amazingly 90's-looking people. Some of the fashions and hairstyles are pretty impressive and are worth seeing in their own right. Most of the fight/chase scenes have some wailin' electric guitar behind them which underlines the fact that PM knows its audience and wants to give them what they want to see: 80's/90's action in its most uncut form. We definitely applaud that. But this movie also has some comments about the battle of the sexes and some points of view which keep it from getting overly dumb. Plus, Lawton Hobbs (nice name) predates Muammar Qaddafi by many years in initiating the idea of a female bodyguard. Finally, we noticed in the credits that the fight choreographer was Richard Norton. Too bad he couldn't have appeared in the film, even if it was just a cameo.In the end, there's very little NOT to like about Guardian Angel. Cynthia Rothrock is one of our favorite action stars, and here she's backed up by a competent team. You gotta love it.For more action insanity, drop by: www.comeuppancereviews.com

"Guardian Angel" could possibly be the best of Cynthia Rothrock's early 90's low-budget American martial arts flicks, IF the whole movie was as good as its first half hour: during that time we get some dynamic fights, gunplay, a car chase, two car crashes, bad girls with guns, a tight plot, etc. But after Cynthia quits the police force and becomes a bodyguard, the film becomes repetitive and starts to drag. The absolutely gorgeous Lydie Denier (who really caught my eye in a couple of "Acapulco H.E.A.T" episodes I happened to watch) playing a truly evil bi*ch is a definite plus, but the lack of a proper showdown between her and Rothrock is a disappointment. The climax is a relatively large-scale speedboats-and-helicopter chase, but most of it appears to have been done by stunt doubles and is not very exciting. (**1/2)

This is one of those wonderful martial-arts movies that begin with two posses of tough gang members facing off in a park; and when the deal goes wrong and the battle starts, it turns out they all know karate and kung fu! The ever-wooden Cynthia Rothrock plays (as usual) a cynical, deadpan, good cop, this time in Los Angeles. She and her police partners are trying to break up a counterfeiting ring, and when that plot line is exhausted, the story just switches over to something else, and Cynthia becomes the personal bodyguard of a wealthy, great-looking tycoon. Within the film's obviously rock-bottom budget, there's some helicopter action, some speedboat action, some car chases, a brawl where Cynthia beats up everyone in a country-western bar, some swimming-pool scenes with bimbos in thong bikinis, and a surprisingly good horseback chase. About a dozen and a half cops get gunned down. A lot of plot twists happen that just don't make any sense; don't worry about them. (And counterfeiting currency is a federal crime, so where the hell is the FBI? I guess they were too busy.) The fight choreography was done by Cynthia Rothrock's frequent co-star Richard Taylor, whose classy and witty presence in front of the camera would frankly have made this a better movie. He also tended to make Cynthia a better actress when they appeared together, and frankly she could use it; she seems tired and bored, and does her best acting in GUARDIAN ANGEL when she is playing opposite a pet dog to whom she delivers bitter drunken monologues. The dog almost out-acts her! She also wears some of the most god-awful clothing any leading lady has ever worn in any movie: loose, baggy-leg jeans with pale acid-washed areas over each buttock were the most shocking. The other actors are all over the map. You can picture many of the minor characters being cast this way: "Hey, me and some other guys I know are going to be in a movie. You wanna be in it too? No, dude, I'm serious!" Then there are the slumming professionals: the most fun is Lydie Denier, the stunning French model and veteran of "Red Shoe Diaries," "Baywatch," "Melrose Place," and of playing many, many other variations on the sexy French bombshell; here she plays a psychopathic killer as if she were in BAISEZ-MOI or an "Alias" episode and not some direct-to-cable trash like this. There's also the tall, dark and handsome Daniel McVicar, now a regular on "The Bold and the Beautiful," John O'Leary, who has played a dignified old man in dozens of movies and sitcom episodes and does it again here, and Aharon Ipale, the veteran Arab character actor perhaps best known as "Pharaoh Seti" from THE MUMMY and THE MUMMY RETURNS. For these professionals, GUARDIAN ANGEL must be the most laughable entry on their resumes. I gave this movie a better rating than it probably deserves because my daughters, who are enthusiastic martial-arts students, both like to see a woman kicking ass and having the big action scenes for a change. They're still a bit too young to care what a low-quality picture this really was, and just enjoyed cheering Cynthia on as she did her swivel-legged, high-kicking, stick-fighting thing. If you like this kind of flick, you could probably enjoy it on that level.

A female ex-cop who was drummed out of the force for recklessness (and who could probably beat Chuck Norris in a fight) hires herself out as a private bodyguard; her first client is a worthless playboy type. It takes half the movie for her to get kicked off the force in the first place. Lots of great fight choreography but the plot is strictly by the numbers, and the acting is as wooden as the dialogue. Give this one a miss.