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The Sentinel review
2006.05.09 — Entertainment | Movies | Movie Reviews | by Andrew Cole
The game's afoot! [official site] |
Michael Douglas is The Sentinel, a career Secret Service agent protecting the first lady and quietly breaking protocol. Douglas looks good for his 90+ years (or whatever), but this movie is a heavy load to carry for an old man.
First, it's an awful lot like Clint Eastwood's In the Line of Fire, not so much in the plot line, which is about an inside man plotting against the president, but in the setup. Douglas is haunted by his role in the detail protecting Reagan during Hinckley's barely-failed attempt (Eastwood was haunted by the JFK assassination). Douglas is considered something of a fossil, as Eastwood was. He isn't paired with a pretty young rookie to help him keep up as Eastwood was, but rest assured that there is a pretty young rookie in the form of Eva Longoria. Here, she's partnered with Kiefer Sutherland.
[M]y Kiefer Sutherland Rule: always bet against Kiefer Sutherland. |
No giveaway, but I'll take a moment here to mention my Kiefer Sutherland Rule: always bet against Kiefer Sutherland. He's not always the bad guy. He doesn't always get killed. But it's a good bet that he'll come out on the bad end of the screenplay.
Douglas also gets support from Kim Basinger, David Rasche (who, I'm sorry, I just can't stop from thinking of as Sledge Hammer), and Martin Donovan, all fine actors who do fine jobs here looking serious and kind of sad. Or maybe that's just how they felt about being in the movie.
He wants a million dollars, which is refreshingly crass in this golden age of altruism. |
The story differs from In the Line of Fire when Douglas is contacted by an old counterfeiting informant with information that someone inside the Secret Service is plotting to kill the president. He wants a million dollars, which is refreshingly crass in this golden age of altruism. However, once we learn more about this guy, he seems to be the least likely man in DC who might know about an assassination plot.
Those aren't the only questions raised, however. Director Clark Johnson appears in cameo as another agent who wants to talk to Douglas about something important enough to get him killed, but hey it can wait until after work.
I liked Clark Johnson from his Homicide: Life on the Street days. But his cameo in SWAT didn't bode well for this movie. Here was my reaction to seeing him on screen: "Hey, there's Clark Johnson! Wait, he's the director.... Oh, he's gonna die soon. Yep, he died."
How does Douglas know how to tap someone's phone from a telephone pole? |
How does Douglas, who has worked bodyguard duty since the mid-80s, know how to tap someone's phone from a telephone pole? Why does the Secret Service rely on nothing more than a round of polygraph tests to decide which agents to investigate... and meanwhile keep right on going about their job instead of, say, bringing in the FBI to take over the more sensitive duties? And don't get me started on the bad guys. Nothing about them makes any sense: not who they are, not how they have an inside man, not why they kill ancillary characters, nothing.
The screenplay was written by George Nolfi, who gave the world his adaptations of Timeline and Ocean's Twelve. It's adapted from a novel by Gerald Petievitch, which, I have to imagine, held together better than the film.
Kiefer Sutherland keeps the tension up by being angry most of the time. |
Still, the direction from Johnson is crisp and well-paced, and Kiefer Sutherland keeps the tension up by being angry most of the time. Longoria is strictly along for the ride, tho, and the finale degrades into a fairly silly super-drama manhunt, with Douglas, who can't make supervisor, outwitting everyone who is after him and even winning them over.
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