The Sentinel: Critic Reviews

Eva Longoria is the first-day-on-the-job rookie Sutherland improbably takes on as his partner. Her presence is the only irrefutable confirmation that this musty movie was indeed shot in the 21st century.

Why would Michael Douglas attach himself to a Washington thriller as deeply ridiculous, suspense-free and potentially career-damaging as The Sentinel?

It's a competent, if forgettable and implausible, thriller with some decent acting on the part of Sutherland and Michael Douglas as Secret Service agents.

Sentinel is a medium-dumb thriller that starts out with momentary promise but gets progressively sillier.

It's as dutiful and humorless as any lesser Harrison Ford vehicle, though not as unforgivable as this year's Ford jalopy, Firewall.

[The film] has more holes than Bush's war plan and employs less fluent English.

The story and style fit comfortably with today's TV and movie fashions: the cop procedural, kinetic editing, a pressure-cooker job rife with competition, and a countdown to possible disaster.

The Sentinel's brains may be mush, but its brawn is powered by superb stunts, high-tech gizmos and a potent sense of peril.

The Sentinel winds up being a cool way to spend a couple of hours. For the average moviegoer of late, that's almost joyous news.

The movie strains with fast cuts and Steadicam swoops to make thrilling a job that, while hardly mundane, should be routine.

At a time when American audiences seem grateful for the opportunity to drool at mindless horror trash, it is encouraging that well-crafted thrillers are still being made about characters who have dialogue, identities, motives and clean shirts.

After a solid first third, The Sentinel wobbles and lurches and starts unsurprising you with its unsurprises.

Rife with meaningless hugger-mugger, the movie is no In the Line of Fire.

It's a pity that a film with so much promise descends into such lazy predictability.

There are tense situations, daring escapes, shots fired, innocent civilians at risk, foreign terrorists. What else do you need?

The movie keeps running in circles, creating the illusion of progress. But by the end, you've gone nowhere. The Manchurian Candidate it isn't.

A half-hearted exercise in political paranoia,The Sentinel unravels its wrong-man scenario with business-like efficiency and an impressively jittery visual scheme, but falls far short of providing visceral or emotional thrills.

The Sentinel is so bland that it wants only to be as good as TV.

This is solid genre filmmaking that makes up for a lack of surprises with superior performances, excellent depictions of tradecraft (shades of CSI) and whiplash editing and pacing.

If the movie had seized on the purely tacky melodramatic potential of the plot so far -- The Sentinel might have floated above its own silliness on bubbles of pure soap.

The Sentinel, a contrived and tepid thriller that insists on wanting to interest us in its main plot -- the usual nefarious plan to assassinate the leader of the free world.

There are thousands of us in over-air-conditioned screening rooms all over the country, throwing our bodies between you and bad movies. When I see a bullet coming, I'll take the hit so you don't have to. Don't thank me, ma'am. It's my job.

So, although some enjoyment can be had from watching The Sentinel with an uncritical eye, it remains a deeply flawed piece of mainstream action entertainment.

A rather mechanical, soulless affair that avoids politics or anything else that might clearly define who these characters are and why we should care.