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I’m the one who set up this investigation. I am being framed!
Pete Garrison, The Sentinel

The Sentinel

Movie Review

2006 | R
Reviewed November 1, 2007
Rating: 1 stars

Oh-em-gee, dere iz a mole in da Secret Service!!!!11eleventy Only it’s not Michael Douglas. Seriously, Kiefer, it’s not Michael Douglas. But this is one of those movies where everyone has to be very dense for an hour and fifteen minutes, so that the sudden dawning of reality at the very end is extra-exciting to watch. I’m pretty sure all “mole in the government, shoo-fly-shoo!” plotlines have been done to death since at least 1990, so why this movie even exists is beyond me; there are no new takes, no special twists, not even the jazzy special effects that are usually used to justify films like this. Michael Douglas is treading perilously close to Harrison Ford territory in his delusion that he’s not too old to be an action hero; the usually reliable Kiefer Sutherland stumbles through his role like he hasn’t had his morning coffee (to be fair, he couldn’t do much with the bad script anyway), and Eva Longoria is there for no apparent reason in a role that merely requires her to look concerned and have cleavage. As far as the plot goes, I correctly picked out the mole within the first fifteen minutes, and then I had to sit through another hour before the stupid little people on the screen finally cottoned on and decided to start shooting at each other, which caused Kim Basinger (as the President’s wife) to do that weird twitchy-shrieky seizure thing she does whenever she’s pretending to dodge bullets (see Batman). If this is a realistic portrait of the Secret Service, then those poor real-life agents have to suffer through a daily routine of predictable boredom punctuated by moments of intense stupidity, and always with the lurking fear that they might have to make out with Kim Basinger. Yeep.