The Sentinel - Austin American-Statesman movie review

'The Sentinel' does its duty as a solid thriller

By PATRICK BEACH
Austin American-Statesman

It must be awesome to be president. You get to bomb any country you want, your motorcade stops traffic and breezes through red lights and you get to sleep with FLOTUS, the terminally hot Kim Basinger. Unfortunately, so does Michael Douglas.

20th Century Fox

'The Sentinel'

3 out of 5 stars

Director: Clark Johnson
Starring: Michael Douglas, Kiefer Sutherland, Eva Longoria, Martin Donovan, Paul Calderon
Run time: 108 minutes
Release date: April 21, 2006
Rating: PG-13 for some intense action violence and a scene of sensuality.
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This is something of a problem in Clark ("S.W.A.T.") Johnson's unpredictably knotty thriller "The Sentinel," because Douglas' character, Pete Garrison, is a Secret Service agent assigned to the first lady's detail. And Garrison's issues don't stop there: Although he's a hero in the agency for taking a bullet for Reagan and overall superior abilities, he's estranged from his colleague and former best friend, David Breckinridge (Kiefer Sutherland, boldly cast against type as a federal agent), who believes Garrison slept with his wife. Although they hate each other, Breckenridge and Garrison — along with new arrival Jill Marin (Eva Longoria) — have to work together to root out one of their own who's in on a plot to assassinate the president. After Garrison fails a polygraph and other incriminating evidence falls into hot-headed Breckenridge's hands, Garrison is forced to go on the lam to clear his name, find the real mole and monkeywrench the assassination plot.

Yes, you've seen this before. On its face, "The Sentinel" is boilerplate genre stuff, a mash-up of "The Fugitive" and (insert favorite political thriller here). Within those limitations, however, it has a lot to recommend it, not least the exceptional detail in which the secret world of the Secret Service is rendered. This is what happens when your movie is based on a novel by a former agent (Gerald "To Live and Die in L.A." Petievich) and has another as an adviser. The mood of professional paranoia within the service, as well as its lingo ("Classic is in the Oval"), the furtive speaking into shirt-cuff microphones, the esprit de corps and inter-agency rivalries provide texture and illumination into a corner of government that is only slightly less secretive than the National Security Agency.

Douglas' character is a quintessentially flawed hero. There are no teenage lawn boys to tempt Longoria. We get to hear Sutherland say something other than, "Tony, it's Jack! Call off the air strike now!"

There's a moment or two that might strain your suspension-of-disbelief muscles, but in the interest of asking a penetrating question: Would you kill a friend to do your job?