In 141 years, the Secret Service has never had a traitor…until now. That's the sort of log line that makes studio brass stand at attention. When the lead also happens to be an agent somewhat past his prime, that makes aged stars like Michael Douglas stand at attention. Playing opposite Kim Basinger probably didn't hurt, either.

Of course, Clint Eastwood riffed on the Secret Service with In the Line of Fire, but his job involved putting to rest the demons of JFK. In The Sentinel, Douglas' Pete Garrison has been lionized for taking a bullet for Ronald Reagan. He's not exactly haunted by his past, though a couple of shots near the beginning of the film want you to think so.

Garrison has a different secret, more along the lines of Kevin Costner in My Bodyguard. It couldn't come at a worse time, either, as while he romances the President's wife, someone out there threatens to kill the President.

If you've seen any thriller before, you know it's only a matter of time before Garrison gets framed for being the wanna-be assassin. In many ways, The Sentinel goes by the numbers. While Garrison plays footsie with the First Lady, his best student Jill Marin (Eva Longoria) joins his former best friend David Breckinridge (Kiefer Sutherland) in investigating just who the mole within the Secret Service is.

Of course, Garrison and Breckinridge had a falling out when the younger man thought Garrison slept with his wife. Despite being an investigator who looks at all the facts rather than just those that fit his theories, Breckinridge cannot get past his erroneous belief that Garrison betrayed him. And so the game is on…

Director Clark Johnson gets the film off to a pretty good start, lifting it above the usual political thriller fare. Making a cameo as the first to stumble across the plot, Johnson fills the first half-hour with visual noise. Overlays of threats in a variety of languages appear both visually and aurally, giving a taste of how hard it must be for the Secret Service to separate credible threats from insanity.

Much of the film also utilizes surveillance camera angles, sometimes from a faceless photographer, sometimes through security cameras. It all ratchets up the paranoia. In a nice counterpoint, Johnson also has the characters consistently use very low tech ways of evading observation. A simple change of jacket messes things up for people too focused on the specifics.

That stylistic tension also deflects attention away from the plot holes, with characters meeting for not much of a reason other than it can make for a tense scene. At least the audience gets to see a lot of procedural stuff with a decent sense of urgency, a technique Johnson learned from his days on the late great Homicide: Life on the Streets Try not to notice that too many of those scenes involve red herrings.

Many of the characters lead us nowhere as well. President Ballentine (David Rasche) seems a likable enough fellow, but we get no sense as to why his marriage has conflict in it. That's only odd because his wife Sarah's affair with Garrison is so clearly meant to be a symptom, not the cause. At least Sarah (Basinger) gets to be fairly strong, though beyond that we don't know much. She fares better than Breckinridge's wife, who appears in the lamest and most pointless scene, with Garrison once again grilling her as to why his former best friend thinks they had an affair.

Bad dialoguing happens quite often, but whether that's a function of George Nolfi's screenplay or just haphazard editing is too close to call. Cutting scenes with this kind of tension can be a difficult task, one that doesn't always work in The Sentinel.

The two marquee stars do their jobs well. Douglas can play wrongly accused yet still guilty better than almost anyone around, even as his star fades. Just to remind us that Sutherland can handle the big screen as well as the small, he works hard as Breckinridge.

If Longoria, however, looked to this as a step out of television, it's too soon to tell. Her character suffers from being a bit underwritten and despite being sharp in the beginning, soon devolves into just looking concerned. But it's not her show anyway. Her role exists just to be in the shadow of her two mentors.

The Sentinel should stand watch over the next couple of weekends, but for action fans, it's just a placeholder until Mission: Impossible III.

Rating:

Derek McCaw