April 24, 2006, 7:28 a.m.
Unintelligence Thriller
D.C. may be picture-perfect, but The Sentinel is anything but.

By Peter Suderman

From Strangers on a Train to All the President's Men, there is a long tradition of setting movies in Washington, but as The Sentinel reminds us, a capitol setting doesn't necessarily make for a capital idea. A hollow, slapdash attempt to trade on the success of TV's popular spy thriller, 24, this is a movie that aspires only to the competence of network television, but fails at even that. For everyone involved, this Secret Service thriller is mostly a disservice.

The script by George Nolfi is woefully underdeveloped, a string of lazy, uninspired action scenes and low-rent tech-thriller hijinks (many involving Michael Douglas's Blackberry) that would've been heckled out of a MacGuyver screenwriter's meeting. Borrowing both the lead and the government-mole setup from 24, it's a hackneyed tale of duplicity and deceit in the highest ranks of the U.S. Secret Service. Michael Douglas plays Pete Garrison, an agent who, we're supposed to somehow believe, is having an affair with the First Lady (Kim Basinger). When Garrison discovers that there may be a mole plotting to kill the president, he brings in Agents David Breckinridge and Jill Marin (Kiefer Sutherland and Eva Longoria) to investigate — but the investigation quickly points to Garrison as the mole.

For 24 devotees, the idea of a traitor in the White House is about as exciting as a lecture by Al Gore. That show has given us two administration moles on this season alone, one of whom is the president of the United States. The Sentinel cannot muster anything so delightfully outlandish; it's a big-screen thriller that could actually benefit from more implausibility. Whereas 24 revels in both its brutality and its ludicrous storylines, always aiming to supercharge the secret-agent formula, The Sentinel seems vaguely embarrassed anytime it has to resort to spy-film tradecraft. Like a clumsy academy trainee, it has most of the tools and techniques available, but its execution is dreadfully amateur. One almost feels bad for the A-list stars involved. What were they thinking?

Of the four leads, only Basinger comes away unscathed, mostly by virtue of her measly screen time. Sutherland doesn't have much to do other than play hard-nosed and by the books, though it's amusing to watch notorious rule-breaker Jack Bauer lecture someone on protocol. Longoria barely registers as yet another of Hollywood's plethora of young, attractive, sharply dressed government agents. As with many big-screen outings, the cast has been cleansed of anything approaching a physical flaw. One gets the impression that dimwitted thrillers such as this take place in an alternate universe where the professions of model and actor don't exist, so impossibly good-looking people all want to be federal agents and lawyers instead.

Douglas, gamely playing along, makes great effort to show off his thick hair and cleft chin, but spends a lot of the running time fiddling with his Blackberry. This is perhaps the only thing the movie gets right about Washington.

Viewers familiar with D.C. geography may enjoy the film more than others. Faced with the film's unrelenting procession of tedium, they'll be able to pass the time playing "spot the famous D.C. landmark" and wondering how Michael Douglas managed to walk so quickly between the Mayflower Hotel and Union Station.

Like many Hollywood productions, the film's creators seem to have gleaned their knowledge of the nation's capitol from gas-station brochures. It's one of those movies that sets all its exterior scenes in postcard-perfect view of well-known landmarks, as if all classified government conversations occurred during strolls in front of monuments.

For a movie about the presidency, it is surprisingly mute politically. A speech at the end shows the president supporting the Kyoto treaty — Hollywood's idea of something we can all agree on — but otherwise sticks to letting the president make vague pronunciations about the power and symbol of his office. Perhaps we should be thankful; the last film that saw Michael Douglas in the White House was The American President, which wasn't so much a movie as an amusing dramatization of Democrat talking points.

The Sentinel is so dull it doesn't even have the decency to be stylish empty dreck. It can't find a consistent tone, though it does occasionally get bored with itself and segue into a spasmodically edited, Seven-style ominous montage of newspaper clippings and paranoid anti-government scribblings, none of which have the slightest bit of relevance to the story. The movie seems aware of its hopelessness, and at some point mid-way through, it appears to simply give up. Having lost its way in America's capitol, the film's final act throws its hands in the air and darts off to Canada, which is just as desperate a move for the movie as it was for Bill Clinton.

Jonah Goldberg recently wrote that "Hollywood has yet to make a 'great' film about Washington." If this is the best the movie industry can do, perhaps they should quit trying.

— Peter Suderman is assistant editorial director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He maintains a blog on film and culture at www.alarm-alarm.com.

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