Guarding Tess

Just when he thought he’d finally escaped the clutches of the widowed and rather headstrong former First Lady, Tess Carlisle (Shirley Maclaine), to undertake a more active assignment in Washington, SAIC (that’s “Special Agent In Charge�) Doug Chesnic (Nicolas Cage) discovers that it isn’t quite THAT easy to get off the hook. He gets called back into her service as a special favour to the President – and to say he’s reluctant about the whole deal would be stating the somewhat obvious.

And so the straight-laced, just the facts ma’am agent returns to the backwoods of Ohio, and back to such duties fitting of a Secret Service member of his calibre as delivering brekkie in bed, caddying and attending the opera. His lack of joy at this turn of events is somewhat obvious, leading to more than the odd clash of heads with the once First Lady, who seems to be after a bit of spark in her life rather than simply spending her time wistfully reliving her past and ruing her lack of closeness with her two children. However, when Doug finally has enough and quits, Tess has one somewhat chunky ace up her sleeve, the ability to run to the current President - who is rather nonplussed at hearing from her over such trivialities. A quick Presidential word in Doug’s ear later, live from Air Force One no less, and he’s back in Tess’ domain, with his tail between his legs.

The equally as stubborn pair of Doug and Tess continue their battle of wits until the latter decides to sack her phalanx of guardian agents, however this decision may end up leading to some rather serious and unforeseen stuff going down...

"What does she want now, a goddamn fruit drink or something?"

When a release boasts “from the director of The First Wives Club� on its cover nobody with even an ounce of sanity could be chastised for wishing to run a mile. However, whereas that “effort� from director Hugh Wilson was absolute ickiness personified, mercifully he’s made an altogether much better fist of Guarding Tess. Mind you, having two stars the calibre of Cage and Maclaine surely doesn’t harm anybody’s chances of not making a mess, with the former at his steely, mostly unemotional best and the latter putting in yet another magnificently feisty performance equal to many of her best. It all tends to amble along quite sedately until towards the end, when things suddenly arc up somewhat dramatically, managing to hook you in when until then you may very well have just been thinking, “oh, this is pleasant enough, but...�

An almost ten year old film, a no frills release, this must be a lousy print, right? BZZT! Wrong, wrong, wrong! While there are some small issues such as the odd little speck cropping up here and there, approximately one minor instance of aliasing, and a modicum of grain in some scenes, really there’s nothing more troublesome with this 16x9 enhanced 1.85:1 presentation than you'd experience on many releases of films that have seen much more recent cinematic action.

The blacks are fabulously solid and detail is pretty good without being exceptional, whilst colour and skin tones are nicely realistic. As this is a single layered disc we don’t even have to endure a layer change. In all this is another nice job from those we tend to name check rather regularly around here for good reason, the Sony DVD Center.

Now here’s a surprise, the English audio stream (there are also versions in French, German, Italian and Spanish) comes in Dolby Digital 5.1 (the others are in surround-encoded Dolby Digital stereo). That being said it is a rather somnambulistic affair as far as the surrounds and subwoofwoof go, with some vague storm activity on rare occasions and not much else. That is until about ten minutes before the end of the film, when if you happen to be nodding off after one too many drops of red you will be savagely jolted into the land of the living as things go somewhat feral aurally. Meanwhile, it’s all synched perfectly.

The score is by one Michael Convertino, and it’s a suitably presidential type affair - in other words if you’ve seen any other flick that involves anything vaguely US President related then you’ll know what to expect, and that’s pomp AND circumstance. Or something like that...

Being a budget release no expense has been, erm, spent in so far as filling all that left over space with goodies. All we get are four theatrical trailers, which at least all bear some relevance to Guarding Tess. They all come in full frame with Dolby Digital stereo sound, the first being for the film in question, whilst the others are the Nicolas Cage films It Could Happen to You and Peggy Sue Got Married, plus the Shirley Maclaine (and Rikki Lake – go Rikki!) flick Mrs Winterbourne.

If you’re after a somewhat more pleasant night’s entertainment than much of the full-on fare floatin garound at present, but still with a with a bit of bite and some nice subtle humour, then you could do a lot worse than put the bunny back in the box and give Guarding Tess a spin in the old DVD player. Both the video and audio presentations are surprisingly good for such a release, even if anything useful in the way of extras is sadly lacking.