The Sentinel
In ''The Sentinel," Jack Bauer is hunting down an old friend who may be trying to assassinate the president. The old friend is played by special guest star Michael Douglas, who looks like he might pass out from exhaustion. Wait -- excuse me? ''The Sentinel" isn't an entire season of ''24" smushed into a bland two hours of movie? Does Kiefer Sutherland know?
He spends the film in too-big sunglasses and dark suits, barking commands and tiptoeing around corners with a gun cocked in pursuit of his Oscar-winning suspect. You would think Sutherland would want to use his downtime from that show to wow us with something we didn't already know he could do. Can he dance? Does he juggle? If saving the world isn't yet boring for him, watching him do it in ''The Sentinel" was boring for me.
Fox is behind both the TV program and the movie, the latter being an implicit and dubious brand extension of the former. Sutherland, who seems teeny-tiny on a big screen, plays David Breckinridge, a Bauer-tastic Secret Service agent helping to unravel the plot against President Ballentine (David Rasche). The scheme is coming from within the Secret Service, and all signs point to Douglas's Pete Garrison, the highly respected veteran agent who's spotted at suspicious locations and has just flunked his lie detector test.
Garrison protests his innocence, but goes on the run, anyway. Yet if he seems guilty, he is: of loving the first lady, who's played by the ageless Kim Basinger, in one of Anne Archer's old parts. We spend the whole movie hip to a liaison that no White House agent is bright enough to figure out. Sounds more like the Secret Disservice to me. That affair is the kind of news that would make killing her husband a tasty (and, of course, reprehensible) necessity.
But, oh, were ''The Sentinel" the juicy potboiler it should be. But starting with that starchy title, which is taken from a novel by ex-Secret Service agent Gerald Petievich, the movie won't cop to its trashy impulses. It's as dutiful and humorless as any lesser Harrison Ford vehicle, though not as unforgivable as this year's Ford jalopy, ''Firewall."
''Sentinel" director Clark Johnson, who appears briefly in the film (he's the agent who's murdered in the first minutes), has concentrated on terrific gritty cop shows such as ''Homicide" and ''The Shield." This movie seems like an opportunity for him to do a Tony Scott impersonation, which extends all the way to the noisy horror-flick interludes that purport to approximate the mind of an unseen assassin and the overedited action sequences. Johnson's most persuasive homage to Scott is the camera's persistent leering at the Sexy Female Agent's body, which belongs to Eva Longoria, the most underrated Desperate Housewife.
Longoria is a breezy and mild diversion from the fact that ''The Sentinel" is short on politics and shorter on thrills. TV, nowadays, does the political thriller better, more viscerally, and less predictably. This movie's president isn't a lame duck -- he's lame. The assassins seem obliged to kill him more to keep the plot going than to advance any agenda -- unless that agenda is promoting awareness that our once-formidable leading men seem to be in decline.
Douglas joins Ford in a club of sputtering stars trying to stay relevant in tired commercial dross. It might be time for them to take a page from Clint Eastwood's operating manual and consider the idea of mortality, which his films have spent the last 15 years ruminating. Heroism may never get old, but heroes do, and for Ford and Douglas to keep slugging away at dead material is embarrassing. In Douglas's case, I suppose things could always have been worse. He could have shown up in ''Basic Instinct 2."
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
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