The Bodyguard

Frank Farmer (Kevin Costner) is a bodyguard and after protecting government officials for so long, he realises that he can protect celebrities and get paid big dollars for it.

His latest client is Rachel Marron (Whitney Houston) famous singer and actor who has been getting death threats and indecent mail. It's up to Frank to protect Rachel, find who is sending the letters and not fall in love.

Here's the biggest problem with the disc. When you try to fit 2 hours of footage on a single layer you will get into real problems if the source isn't all the best and the quality of the compression has to be restricted.

The transfer is 16x9 enhanced but the benefits achieved mean that you'll see more detailed artifacts :). There ARE mpeg artifacts indeed as the bit-rate is pretty low and in certain scenes they are much more apparent than others. Black level is mediocre and there is alot of noise present.

In the latter scenes, the artifacting becomes more prominent and edges and lines exhibit blockiness which do detract from the movie. To compound that, right through the opening credits and into the first few scenes the image seems to jump and jitter (telecine wobble?) which is not good for the mpeg codec. You have been warned.

A mere 2 channel surround provides a simplistic soundtrack. Whitneys music makes the movie but even then it seems a little harsh at times, not her voice, the dolby digital bit-stream.

There is surround activity and simplistic bass response but the video quality detracted me from anything else about the movie.

UPDATE: The dvd is in fact encoded in 5.1 but silly Steve had the review player set to 2 channel output as I'd been fiddling with the new Start players menu system. The soundtrack is actually pretty good, especially during Whitneys thumping singles - check out when she is promoting her new song to the large crowd.

Bass is extended in some scenes so you won't be disappointed there and as an overall, the 5.1 remaster of the original stereo soundtrack is pretty damn good.

Three subtitles and a snapper case.

It's a good movie, probably the most popular romantic story of 1992 but this dvd doesn't do it justice. In a time where dual layered discs are more common than single layer, it should have been a much better presented disc but alas, it comes off cheap. I can only recommend it if you desperately want the movie.