If it's Tuesday, this must be another Cynthia Rothrock film. The petite martial artist cranks out so many B-features (e.g., LADY DRAGON, CHINA O'BRIEN, RAGE AND HONOR, MARTIAL LAW, FAST GETAWAY--plus their sequels) that viewers may have difficulty telling one from another. With a script
like the one behind GUARDIAN ANGEL, who could blame them?
The cliches begin when LAPD Detective Christine McKay announces that she's engaged to a fellow cop. One knows instinctively the guy's doomed, and the only surprise is that it takes a full 30 minutes before sexy counterfeiter Nina Lindell (Lydie Denier) cashes him in for good. Christine quits the
force to become a free-agent bodyguard, and she gets her first client when Nina breaks out of jail and her former lover Laughton Hobbs (Daniel McVicar) demands protection. Hobbs is a blase Hefner-style millionaire playboy, a stereotype so out of date he's almost fun. Christine battles him verbally
when she's not involved in physical combat with Nina and her gang. Hobbs claims that Nina's got a FATAL ATTRACTION grudge against him, but in truth she's after the counterfeit printing plates designed by his brother and hidden somewhere in the mansion. Their location is painfully obvious to anyone
with half a brain, so the characters never do find them, and Christine sends Nina to a fiery end in a high-speed boat chase.
French-Canadian Denier makes a change-of-pace menace for a Rothrock vehicle--she's no septuple black-belt killing machine, but a more traditional femme fatale. Still, the high-kicking heroine gets a customary action workout via Nina's mysteriously inexhaustible supply of anonymous mugs in jeans
and muscle shirts. But it's McVicar's tongue-in-cheek turn as the Robert Wagnerian poor little rich boy that makes GUARDIAN ANGEL watchable, if hardly a standout. Associate producer was Don "The Dragon" Wilson, himself a celluloid kickboxer with almost as many titles sagging video-store shelves as
Cynthia Rothrock. (Profanity, violence, substance abuse.) leave a comment
