|

Now Playing
Critics & Publications
Archives: A-Z Index
Advanced Search
Upcoming Release Calendar
Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Film In Our Forums

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

64
Appaloosa
69
Ashes of Time Redux
68
August Evening
54
Battle in Seattle
76
Betrayal - Nerakhoon, The
67
Black Balloon, The
55
Boy in the Striped Pajamas, The
50
Breakfast with Scot
63
Changeling
47
Choke
84
Christmas Tale, A
41
Cthulhu
81
Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
xx
Dostana
62
Duchess, The
46
Dukes, The
63
Eden
xx
Extreme Movie
69
Fear(s) of the Dark
26
Filth and Wisdom
28
Fireproof
73
Frost/Nixon
82
Frozen River
43
Gardens of the Night
73
Girl Cut in Two, A
54
Good Dick
30
Guitar, The
84
Happy-Go-Lucky
31
Hounddog
26
House of the Sleeping Beauties
47
How About You
68
Hunger
72
I Served the King of England
70
I.O.U.S. A
40
Igor
78
I've Loved You So Long
63
JCVD
27
Lake City
82
Let the Right One In
xx
Let Them Chirp Awhile
xx
Local Color
89
Man on Wire
84
Momma's Man
51
Morning Light
34
My Name Is Bruce
xx
Nobel Son
40
Other End of the Line, The
34
Otto; or Up with Dead People
75
Pool, The
77
Pray the Devil Back to Hell
82
Rachel Getting Married
56
Religulous
32
Repo! The Genetic Opera
53
RocknRolla
57
Sixty Six
85
Slumdog Millionaire
57
Special
79
Stranded: I Have Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains
67
Synecdoche, New York
82
Tell No One
83
Trouble the Water
43
Tru Loved
83
U2 3D
59
We Are Wizards
55
What Just Happened?
89
Man on Wire
85
Slumdog Millionaire
84
Momma's Man
84
Christmas Tale, A
84
Happy-Go-Lucky
83
Trouble the Water
83
U2 3D
82
Tell No One
82
Rachel Getting Married
82
Frozen River
82
Let the Right One In
81
Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
79
Stranded: I Have Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains
78
I've Loved You So Long
77
Pray the Devil Back to Hell
76
Betrayal - Nerakhoon, The
75
Pool, The
73
Girl Cut in Two, A
73
Frost/Nixon
72
I Served the King of England
70
I.O.U.S. A
69
Ashes of Time Redux
69
Fear(s) of the Dark
68
August Evening
68
Hunger
67
Black Balloon, The
67
Synecdoche, New York
64
Appaloosa
63
JCVD
63
Eden
63
Changeling
62
Duchess, The
59
We Are Wizards
57
Special
57
Sixty Six
56
Religulous
55
Boy in the Striped Pajamas, The
55
What Just Happened?
54
Battle in Seattle
54
Good Dick
53
RocknRolla
51
Morning Light
50
Breakfast with Scot
47
How About You
47
Choke
46
Dukes, The
43
Tru Loved
43
Gardens of the Night
41
Cthulhu
40
Igor
40
Other End of the Line, The
34
My Name Is Bruce
34
Otto; or Up with Dead People
32
Repo! The Genetic Opera
31
Hounddog
30
Guitar, The
28
Fireproof
27
Lake City
26
House of the Sleeping Beauties
26
Filth and Wisdom
xx
Dostana
xx
Let Them Chirp Awhile
xx
Local Color
xx
Nobel Son
xx
Extreme Movie
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
|
Sentinel, The
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
FILM:
MPAA RATING: PG-13 for some intense action violence and a scene of sensuality
Starring
Michael Douglas,
Kiefer Sutherland,
Kim Basinger,
Eva Longoria,
David Rasche,
Raoul Bhaneja,
Simon Reynolds,
and
Danny A. Gonzales
Special Agent Pete Garrison is convinced that a Neo-Nazi Aryan Disciple has managed to infiltrate the White House. When a White House Agent is murdered, Garrison is framed and blackmailed over an affair with the First Lady. Garrison is relieved of his duties, but he won't stop trying to prove his innocence, or giving his all to save the life of the President.
| GENRE(S): |
Crime
|
Drama
|
Suspense/Thriller
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
George Nolfi
Gerald Petievich (novel)
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
Clark Johnson
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: August 29, 2006
Theatrical: April 21, 2006
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
105 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: |
USA |

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
75
Christian Science Monitor
Peter Rainer
Michael Douglas plays US Secret Service agent Pete Garrison, and his jaw has never seemed tighter.

75
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
It is encouraging that well-crafted thrillers are still being made about characters who have dialogue, identities, motives and clean shirts.

75
New York Daily News
Jami Bernard
Implausible yet enjoyably diverting thriller.

75
San Francisco Chronicle
Mick LaSalle
A well-constructed and genuinely tense thriller.

70
Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan
An unassuming thriller, a nifty piece of genre filmmaking without frills or self-importance. It's a throwback, if you will, to the days of B pictures, when formula movies were made with a maximum of skill and a minimum of pretense.

63
USA Today
Claudia Puig
Director Clark Johnson has an energetic style of filmmaking and a facile way with stunts and chase sequences. The result is a fairly stylish action thriller. We've seen plenty of suspense films in which a seemingly good guy is framed, so it helps when a director can pull off a few cinematic tricks to keep audiences on their toes.

63
ReelViews
James Berardinelli
Director Clark Johnson and screenwriter George Nolfi (adapting the novel by Gerald Petievich) do an excellent job of setting things up and getting the story underway. Unfortunately, some of their hard work is undone during the movie's final third.

63
Premiere
Jessica Letkemann
Ultimately all of the ado about men in shades and dark suits running around shooting and shouting at each other comes to a satisfying, if predictable, conclusion.

60
The Hollywood Reporter
Kirk Honeycutt
A slick enough thriller about a presidential assassination attempt. It is also a rather mechanical, soulless affair that avoids politics or anything else that might clearly define who these characters are and why we should care.

58
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Sean Axmaker
No, it's not the big screen version of "24." For one thing, Sutherland is in the wrong role.

58
Baltimore Sun
Chris Kaltenbach
The Sentinel moves quickly and never becomes a bore. It does become something of a cartoon, though, which proves a major letdown for a movie that aims for something far more intelligent.

58
Portland Oregonian
Shawn Levy
We have reached a point in history when an ordinary TV show is often as good as or even better than an ordinary movie. And movies don't come much more ordinary than The Sentinel.

50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Rick Groen
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.

50
TV Guide
Maitland McDonagh
Douglas and Sutherland do crackling hostility with devilish glee, and the fireworks are nothing if not entertaining.

50
Boston Globe
Wesley Morris
The Sentinel isn't an entire season of ''24" smushed into a bland two hours of movie? Does Kiefer Sutherland know?

50
Charlotte Observer
Lawrence Toppman
The movie gives away its shifty-eyed villain almost immediately. What it doesn't give away is why he betrayed his trust, who wants the president dead or what they hope to gain by killing him.

50
Miami Herald
Peter Debruge
The Sentinel isn't nearly as slick as it must have looked on the page. Those zingers are perfect fodder for a movie preview, but they just don't lead anywhere interesting on-screen.

50
Philadelphia Inquirer
Steven Rea
Eva Longoria brings a crisp swagger and fluent Spanish to her role.

50
Chicago Reader
Andrea Gronvall
Director Clark Johnson (S.W.A.T.) has a flair for action, which compensates for the flattening effect of Gabriel Beristain's cinematography.

50
Austin Chronicle
Steve Davis
Always an intriguing (though sometimes unpolished) actress, Basinger has softened the rough edges over the years to become an extremely watchable performer who deserves better roles than those in which she appears onscreen.

50
LA Weekly
Scott Foundas
Sentinel works overtime to suggest what a thrill-a-minute world its characters inhabit; but only during the last 20 minutes does the movie's pulse (or ours) raise above a flatline. The actors look uniformly unhappy to be there - except for Basinger, who seems lost in a lithium haze.

50
Chicago Tribune
Michael Phillips
Amid the nervousness Douglas and Sutherland do what they can to enliven their warring stereotypes. And now and then, blessedly, The Sentinel nudges toward camp.

50
Variety
Justin Chang
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.

50
New York Post
Kyle Smith
The Sentinel is so bland that it wants only to be as good as TV. Not as good as good TV, like "24." It merely aspires to be the Regis Philbin of D.C. thrillers. It isn't trying to dazzle you with style, complexity or intelligence.

42
Entertainment Weekly
Gregory Kirschling
Looking back, 1993 was a golden age for thriller cinema. That was the year Hollywood hatched both "In the Line of Fire" and "The Fugitive," the two obvious and way superior antecedents for the very humdrum B-movie mash-up The Sentinel.

40
Film Threat
Pete Vonder Haar
Plays like a 108 minute episode of Hawaii 5-0, minus the exotic locale.

40
Slate
Grady Hendrix
The screenwriters seem to have meticulously researched the inner workings of the White House by watching DVDs of "The West Wing," but, despite their hard work, casting sinks the film. With Longoria and Sutherland onboard it feels like an uneasy marriage of "24" and "Desperate Housewives."

40
Washington Post
Desson Thomson
Sentinel is a medium-dumb thriller that starts out with momentary promise but gets progressively sillier.

30
The New York Times
Stephen Holden
The question is why. Why would a star of Michael Douglas's stature and intelligence attach himself to a Washington thriller as deeply ridiculous, suspense-free and potentially career-damaging as The Sentinel?

30
Wall Street Journal
Joe Morgenstern
I can't find much slack to cut the film, except to say that it's a potboiler cooked in an upscale Teflon pot.
30
Village Voice
Bill Gallo
Brought low by its premise and rendered idiotic by its subplot, this alleged political thriller spells momentary doom for star Michael Douglas.


The average user rating for this movie is 5.9 (out of 10) based on 26 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Read more user comments...
Discuss this movie in our forums |
|