Acensbart
Excellent but underrated film
Abbigail Bush
what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.
Derrick Gibbons
An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.
FlashCallahan
Special Agent Pete Garrison is convinced that someone has managed to infiltrate the White House. When a White House Agent is murdered, Garrison is framed and blackmailed over an affair with the First lady. He is relieved of his duties, but Garrison won't stop in trying to prove his innocence, and save the life of the President. While attempting to uncover the person behind it all, he comes into confrontation with his protégé, Agent Breckinridge, whom is convinced that he had an affair with his wife.....It's a pretty sound premise, Douglas having relations with the First Lady, and then being framed for treason, but it wreaks of In The Line Of Fire, and the similarities to 24 cannot be helped, because Sutherland is playing nothing more than Jack Bauer in a suit.And this is where the film makes it's first mistake. With the roles reversed, this could have been 24: the movie, that was floating Hollywood for an age, and Douglas would have played Sutherland's in a Gordon Gekko type way.It's slick enough, the film looks good, and there are a few good set pieces, but there are some things that cannot get out of your head.For instance, when we first meet Longoria, she is metaphorically stalked by an agent who cannot do anything but creepily stare at her, and it really doesn't sit right in the film.So all in all, it's a pretty acceptable thriller, but just perfunctory narrative slightly tarnishes the outcome.
James Hitchcock
Like the Clint Eastwood vehicle "In the Line of Fire" from the nineties, "The Sentinel" is a crime thriller about a veteran Secret Service bodyguard who has to foil a plot to assassinate the President of the United States. There are, however, two particular twists in the storyline. One is that the hero, Pete Garrison, is having an affair with the First Lady. The second twist is that intelligence provided by an informant has revealed that a traitor within the Service is providing secret information to the assassins. Garrison himself is suspected of being the mole, so he is forced to go on the run in order to clear his name, to unmask the real traitor and to save the President's life. "In the Line of Fire" was able to rise above the level of the mundane because of the quality of the acting, not only from Eastwood himself as the Secret Service agent Frank Horrigan but also from John Malkovich as the assassin. Here, although Michael Douglas as Garrison performs capably enough, he is not really in the same class as Eastwood. There is a decent performance from Kiefer Sutherland as Garrison's colleague David Breckinridge, but Eva Longoria as another colleague has little to do except to serve as the film's Official Eye Candy. (Kim Basinger, who here plays the First Lady, presumably retired from the role of Official Eye Candy upon hitting fifty). As for the assassins they are a pretty anonymous bunch and it is never really made clear why they want to kill the President. (Malkovich, by contrast, gives us a detailed psychological portrait of his character). About the only explanation given is that they are Russian, and in the alternative universe inhabited by the scriptwriters of Hollywood thrillers, a universe where the Cold War never ended, the words "Russian" and "villain" are still assumed to be virtually synonymous. (See also "Salt", "Goldeneye", "The Peacemaker", "Air Force One", "Crimson Tide", "Fair Game", "The Sum of All Fears" and others). The film has something in common with some of Douglas's other films from the latter part of his career, such as "Don't Say a Word" or "A Perfect Murder". All three are effective, well-directed thrillers- indeed, I preferred "A Perfect Murder" to Hitchcock's "Dial M for Murder", of which it is a remake- but none of them display any real originality and are made to a standard Hollywood thriller formula. (His recent thriller "Haywire" is made to the same formula, but it is dreadful third-rate nonsense and it is one I certainly would not describe as effective or well-made). In the earlier part of his career Douglas, who is an actor of some talent, did occasionally appear in ground-breaking films ("Wall Street" being a good example) so it seems unfortunate that he now seems to rely more upon the tried and trusted. 6/10
stock-1
Someone reviewed with 'Director should stick with TV movies'. Well guess what he's come up with later .. one of the best rated TV-movies ever, Homeland. What makes a film different from a TV-movie? The time spent on details, sets, castings etc.. Apart from telling a Pulitzer price story The Sentinel has just done that. The casting is superb. At the end of the movie the Presidents reaction when finding out the First Lady is having an affair with the sentinel is not shown, which many find a big miss in the ending. It then indeed drops The Sentinel back to a TV movie, for the average viewer. Clark Johnson could have added a bullshit reason as to why Pete Garrison was sent on his premature retirement. The ending is displayed from the viewpoint of a mid-level security agent, who might never find out in the rest of his career that the Presidents wife was actually having an affair, while being under siege from a couple of Russian terrorists , apparently ex-KGB types who after their organization was disbanded have gone rogue. Again the reason for trying to assassinate the President is not given. Some then claim that because of this the sentinel is a poor movie. I disagree, as the sentinel actually tells a very realistic story, when Walter Xavier is warning Garrison about an upcoming attempt to assassinate the President. What happened is that the Russian terrorists, knowing he's Garrison best informant, started their whole game by approaching Xavier as their first move, which is exactly how these types operate. Again the details of this are not in the movie itself. Does that make it a bad movie ? I disagree.
tieman64
Put Michael Douglas in a film and it's only a matter of time before his character's sexual urges lead to mayhem. Here he plays a Secret Service bodyguard tasked with protecting the President. Problem is, Douglas is also having an illicit affair with the First Lady. Cue much confusion.The film adheres to the "running man" formula ("The Fugitive", "Chain Reaction", "The Incredible Hulk", "Minority Report", "The Bourne Identity", "Enemy of the State" etc), which Hitchcock refined in such films as "Saboteur", "Foreign Correspondent", "The 39 Steps" and "North By Northwest". In each case the film's hero is on the run, falsely accused of a crime which he must solve whilst being pursued. The entire "running man" plot is itself a MacGuffin, our hero jumping from set piece to set piece as he attempts to piece together his puzzle.The good thing about this formula is that you don't need expensive set pieces. The plot itself generates tension; the actors need only ride the wave and look confused. In this regard Douglas does well. One minute he's on top the President's wife, the other minute the whole world wants him dead. Poor guy.7.5/10 – Fast paced and pleasantly old school. Watch "The Bodyguard" and "In The Line Of Fire", the latter which features a scenery chewing Clint Eastwood, to see this kind of thing done marginally better.
