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'The Sentinel': Smart action, familiar plot

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"The Sentinel" is one of those well-oiled-machine movies from Hollywood that's slick in an inoffensive way, efficient in a give-the-viewers-what-they-want way. It has no personality per se, but that's what a picture like this is all about — a kind of gets-the-job-done professionalism we're seeing less and less these days, and which is harder to bring off than you might think.

Someone's trying to assassinate the president of the United States (David Rasche, with that handsomely responsible news anchor look). The word is the "someone" may be a White House insider, so the head of the Secret Service (Martin Donovan) orders all his agents to take a lie detector test.

20th Century Fox

'The Sentinel'

B-

The verdict: Worth a look if you're in the mood for some slick Hollywood escapism that's done well enough, though not brilliantly.

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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That means everyone, from veteran Pete Garrison (Michael Douglas), who decades ago took one (a bullet, that is) for the Gipper, to David Breckinridge (Kiefer Sutherland), Pete's former protege, to Jill Marin (Eva Longoria), a rookie who's been on the job for about two days.

The plot goes off in a half-dozen different directions, many of them familiar from other thrillers like "No Way Out," "The Fugitive" and "In the Line of Fire." One of the more original subplots involves the First Lady (lovely Kim Basinger wearing a tight little smile and alternating between Jackie Kennedy shifts and Laura Bush pant suits) who has her own Secret Service secret.

"The Sentinel's" biggest problem is length. A too-long shootout at a mall. A too-long chase around a rusty tanker. Director Clark Johnson employs quick cuts and switched-out filters, but they can't camouflage that, at 1 hour, 48 minutes (but seeming much longer), the movie could lose a lot of fat.

One explanation may be that Douglas, who's been away from the screen for three years and shares a producing credit here, gave Johnson his marching orders: Show me doing lots of action stuff so I can prove to audiences that, I may be in my 60s, but I'm still spry as hell. It's something of the same thing Harrison Ford was after in "Firewall," but Douglas manages it better — possibly because Ford's film is a good example of how easy it is to muck up this sort of no-brainer action flick.

It also helps that Douglas has Sutherland as his co-star. "24" has made him one of the most popular actors on the planet and he's always been one of the most capable (Dad's genes, I guess). Here, he brings much of his Jack Bauer gravitas to the role, but with a slightly different spin. For one thing, when dealing with Douglas, he sometimes crosses the line between professional treatment and a personal grudge (he thinks his former mentor broke up his marriage).

As the new kid on the block, Longoria proves she can run, shoot, and bark orders at bad guys as well as the best "Charlie's Angel." Her sexy "Desperate Housewives" persona is implicit in the character, but it's played more for grins than anything else.

Screenwriter George Nolfi, who adapted Gerald Petievich's novel, comfortably ignores little things like DNA testing while comfortably including a red herring technique that's pretty much an out-and-out cheat.

The borrowed plot and one-note characters aside, what's best about "The Sentinel" is the behind-the-scene peeks (or purported peeks) we get at what it takes to guard the President on a daily basis. Like the small army required to get the President from the White House to a nearby, conveniently multicultural elementary school for a photo op (and no, it doesn't seem to be a dig at Bush's reading lesson on the morning of 9/11). Further, everyone in the Secret Service's care has a code name: "Classic" for the President and "Cincinnati" for the First Lady.

And you gotta like how, when "Classic" is escorted through a large, unsecured hotel kitchen, an agent tells the chef to put down his knife without so much as turning his head or breaking his stride.

Just doing his job. Like the movie.