A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: The Sentinel

Date Viewed: 4/22/06

Details:

Michael Douglas

Kiefer Sutherland

Eva Longoria

Kim Basinger

David Rasche

Director: Clark Johnson

Score: 1/2

The Review: Derivative, slightly unbelievable mystery thriller about a possible covert agent in the Secret Service.

Rasche is the US President whose chilly relationship with the First Lady (Bassinger) shows up loud and clear in the first few minutes. Douglas is a senior agent on Presidential duty (still famous all those years after taking a bullet for Reagan). Sutherland is type-cast as an iconoclastic, irascible Service investigator, stuck with Longoria as a newbie to the unit, investigating what appears to be a drive-by shooting of another agent. Things get a bit complicated and fuzzy for awhile, not to mention a bungie-cord stretch of disbelief, before they converge on simplicity again. Not a bad 25-cent mystery (inflation over a dime), but probably not worth multiple viewings. And Clark Johnson is no Wolfgang Petersen (In the Line of Fire and Air Force One).

Derivative? Most notably, try In the Line of Fire, but any season of "24" qualifies -- in fact, throughout most of Sentinel, it seems like Sutherland is still in character and on the TV set. And you could perhaps stretch it a bit to include The Manchurian Candidate, and Seven Days in May.

Slightly unbelievable? For one example, the age issue. Even Eastwood's Frank Horrigan in Line of Fire had earned back-office desk-jockey seniority before being dragged unwillingly back into the public eye, and Harrison Ford's President in Air Force One seemed younger, more spry and definitely more of a mensch than Michael Douglas' Pete Garrison. Not to mention the affair itself.

Obvious? Only in one sense: although everyone on screen seems to believe Pete Garrison is the obvious candidate for the mole, no one in the audience seems to believe it for a moment. That could be an elegant counter-counter-intuitive set-up, but you're still rooting for Douglas the good-guy.

(7-May-06)

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