The Sentinel film review

certificate_12A

THE SENTINEL

Michael Douglas has taken a three-year hiatus from the movies to focus on his young family. Or it may have been to purge himself of his last venture, the woeful The In-Laws. It certainly wasn't to revaluate his career. In The Sentinel, a slick, formulaic political thriller, he is back on familiar territory. "You want to see certain actors do certain things," stated The Sentinel's screenwriter George Nolfi, before adding, "I want to see Michael Douglas in a suit and a tie in the corridors of power."

He gets his wish as Douglas plays Pete Garrison, whose long career in the Secret Service includes having taken a bullet meant for Ronald Reagan in the 1981 assassination attempt. Twenty-five years on, his once ascendant career having stalled, he is still getting up at 4am, still guarding the latest president and still dallying with other people's wives rather than finding his own.

Directed by Clark Johnson, who tackled similar material in S.W.A.T., The Sentinel is loosely based on Gerald Petievich's novel, though Nolfi was keen to "transform it into something very realistic." If by that he means introducing a plot centered on the first Secret Service traitor in the agency's 141-year history, then he has succeeded. For those more skeptical, realism is not exactly The Sentinel's forte, but then again the enjoyment of such predictable fare is not contingent on its verisimilitude.

Garrison finds himself suspected of being the Secret Service's mole when a plot to assassinate the president (David Rasche) is uncovered. His affair with the First Lady (Kim Basinger) has made him vulnerable while his affair with the wife of his ex-partner David Breckinridge (Kiefer Sutherland), the man now put in charge of investigating the assassination plot, hasn't helped his cause. Garrison maintains his innocence, claiming he's being framed, but in the face of the evidence he is forced to find out who the real mole is to exonerate himself and before the assassins get to the president.