Reel To Reel: The Sentinel

How It Rates: **
Starring: Michael Douglas, Kiefer Sutherland, Kim Basinger, Eva Longoria
Rated: PG-13
Red Flags: Violence, Some Language

Aside from one promising plot hook, The Sentinel is remarkably mundane, even impotent at times. It has all the elements of a great political thriller -- sex, power, intrigue, and bursts of violence -- but it fails to thrill.

I am writing this review one week after seeing the film, testing my own theory of how forgettable this film is. The only scenes I can remember are those involving Kim Basinger (playing the First Lady) and Michael Douglas (playing a Secret Service agent), and even those scenes are cloudy in my memory. I think I remember them only because I wondered at those points if the film was going to turn towards Fatal Attraction. It doesn't. Maybe it should have.

The Sentinel presents an intriguing set-up: somebody in the Secret Service is plotting to kill the President -- somebody who doesn't resemble George W., if you have to ask. (He's two screens down on American Dreamz, in case you need directions.) The first couple is going through a rough patch: together in photo-ops, distant in private. And Pete Garrison, the Secret Service's pride and joy, is suspected of wanting to off the chief. He's got an enemy: ax-grinding investigator David Breckenridge (Sutherland), a man once under Garrison's wing. And Eva Longoria? She's always easy on the eyes as Breckenridge's partner, someone who's out to prove she's got just as much brains as body. Garrison ends up on the run from the very comrades he leads.

With all this, The Sentinel should sizzle, but it barely manages to fry. Perhaps the filmmakers didn't want an over-the-top thriller, and that's where they blew it. The film doesn't reach for that next level that takes it beyond the chases and gunfights we've seen before.

As for that relationship between Basinger and Douglas' characters, I saw another opportunity squandered. You can probably figure out what happens from what I've mentioned above, but how this relationship plays out is less than gratifying or even realistic, both in its execution and its effects. The whole film could have been structured around it, and it almost fades into afterthought. The Sentinel seems like it's the first draft of a better film, one that could have been doctored on the page before it got to the screen.