The Sentinel

Like leaving a restaurant and still feeling hungry, coming home from the cinema and immediately needing to watch a DVD* is a sure sign something was fundamentally lacking.

The Sentinel is a thriller about a mole inside the Presidential Secret Service. Long serving Pete Garrison (Michael Douglas) comes under suspicion, and it's up to fellow agent and former friend David Breckinridge (Kiefer Sutherland) to track him down and find out the truth. On paper it sounds much like any other thriller cinema or TV has given us over the years; but these types of movie don't have to be original to be entertaining and fun. Sadly, director Clark Johnson has aimed for mediocrity, and missed. Spectacularly.

It's almost inconceivable, but he has somehow managed to sap all trace of peril, tension, or excitement from each and every scene. Events that should be fraught with a heightened sense of danger, are bland and boring. How the hell has he managed it!? You would think a small element of fun and entertainment would slip through, but no. Some combination of fluke, and lack of skill has conspired to deprive us even of that.

Ironically it starts out really well. The opening sequence gives us a fetishistically detailed look at the back stage machinations that go into even the simplest of Presidential appearances. Plenty of codewords and radio chatter, sniper rifles and men with big binoculars; it's the kind of escapist stuff cinema was made for. Garrison and Breckinridge are quickly introduced, their relationship nicely established. Follow this with an unexpected assassination of a Secret Service man, and you honestly think it'll be a good ride; but these opening fifteen minutes are the only ones that work.

Trying to pinpoint the cause for such crushing disappointment is an almost impossible task. Douglas looks like he faxed in his performance whilst on a break from acting. Sutherland, famed for his tough Jack Bauer persona in 24, is given a character so "by the book" you long for him to pin someone against the wall, poke a Microtech Halo in his face and scream "Damn it! Tell me who the mole is or I will kill you!". The story is poorly constructed; the bad guys barely able to pass as one-dimensional. This is made all the more inexcusable when you realise one of the writers has seminal eighties cop thriller To Live and Die in L.A to his name!

Don't let the casting of Kiefer Sutherland and thoughts of 24 lure you in. The Sentinel is uniformly dull; a thriller that doesn't thrill.

(*For those who care to know, it was Ridley Scott's 1989 thriller Black Rain. Arguably one of the finest contemporary movies of that decade, and still criminally overlooked. It too stars Micheal Douglas; though in this one he's actually bloody good, and clearly at a point in his career when he cared about his acting.)