Review of My Bodyguard (1980) by Rob A — 02 Oct 2015

Good coming-of-age flick set in Chicago. I had not seen it since I was a teenager myself. So many films in the 1980s cast twenty-something actors as teenagers and were sex comedies, slob comedies (the latter two often intersected) or featured some guy in a hockey goalie mask killing teenagers.

My Bodyguard actually captured just how difficult it is finding yourself in high school, on the edge of adulthood, and the fear of being the outsider, the kid who doesn't fit in. This film deals with the unlikely friendship between two outsiders.

Chris Makepeace plays a shy, bookish student who has just moved to Chicago and finds his life being made miserable by a group of bullies led by a smarmy Matt Dillon. The picked-upon outsider then engages the services of a feared outsider played by Adam Baldwin to be his bodyguard; Baldwin's hulking character who is rumored to have shot a kid/shot a cop/beat up a teacher/raped a teacher/etc.

is feared by all kids in the school, including the bullies but is actually emotionally wounded and just as vulnerable as anyone else. Makepeace and Baldwin's characters bond and become good friends but Dillon seeks out his own champion to challenge Baldwin and our two heroes have to stand up and fight their mutual bullies in the end.

The stuff with Martin Mull and Ruth Gordon playing Makepeace's character's father and grandmother seems to have arrived in this movie from some Sitcom. In addition we have an early role by Joan Cusack, a pre-Cheers George Wendt (he was still in Chicago's Second City troupe at the time), and a very pre-Flashdance Jennifer Beals in an un-credited role.

Dillon would go on to play more sympathetic characters in several future adaptations of S.E. Hinton novels. More Baldwins (and Cusacks) would appear in future films.