The Sentinel: Grade D

D

The Sentinel

Michael Douglas, Kiefer Sutherland, Eva Longoria, Kim Basinger

MD is in the secret service assigned to the president’s wife (KB) with whom he has an affair. Meanwhile bad guys of unknown origin (KGB was suggested but there is no KGB any more), for unknown motives (they’re just bad – dark skin, foreign accents, facial hair), want to kill the president. Some other government officials are killed too, with silencers, in broad daylight, just for sport, I guess. Turns out there is a mole in the SS working with the bad guys, for unknown motives. The existence of a mole is revealed by a street informer who has no reason to know it. Everyone has to take a polygraph, to find the mole, and MD fails by lying about his affair. Kiefer heads the posse that closes in on him, so MD does the only sensible thing, goes on the run to find the “real” bad guy before it’s too late. Guess how it turns out. Plenty of gratuitous car chases, sirens, radio-speak and explosions. Lots of loud, meaningless noise. A huge helicopter taking off is not noisy enough – no, there also must be ear-splitting trombones. Of course! Why not turn the volume down? Because then you can’t hear the dialog, which, it turns out, is no great loss. MD is getting too old to be a credible action figure, especially when being chased by much younger guys like Kiefer. The women are only pretty faces. The plot has enough intelligence to be mildly interesting, if you like law enforcement pictures.