The Sentinel (2006) Critic Reviews

It is encouraging that well-crafted thrillers are still being made about characters who have dialogue, identities, motives and clean shirts.Read the full review

A well-constructed and genuinely tense thriller.Read the full review

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.Read the full review

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.Read the full review

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.Read the full review

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.Read the full review

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.Read the full review

The Sentinel isn't an entire season of ''24" smushed into a bland two hours of movie? Does Kiefer Sutherland know?Read the full review

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.Read the full review