A Suspenseful Situation
The Sentinel is a pretty entertaining thriller. The movie begins calmly enough but quickly turns up the intensity when Garrison’s love affair with the First Lady, played by Kim Basinger, is discovered. Photos of their intimate relationship surfaces, and Garrison becomes the victim of blackmail, and is simultaneously being setup to be the scapegoat for an assassination plot on the president. Meanwhile, the real mole of the Secret Service is working closely with the terrorist organization that is backing him to get the president in a particular place at a particular time during the G8 summit in Toronto.
What amounts is fairly intriguing story with a few intertwining plots. The trouble with this movie however is how predictable things are; the mole of the Secret Service is obvious to the viewers far in advance of the characters in the movie, which makes it tough to watch. Still, some of the action sequences, especially the brief part in the mall where Garrison gets trapped into a fake meeting, are entertaining. Actually the movie overall was enjoyable, but it isn’t the type of movie you would really want to see a second time.
Translation
In terms of video quality, The Sentinel is just okay. It isn’t one of the better looking blu-ray releases I have seen. I thought the colors looked splotchy, especially much of the background footage. It wasn’t a great looking HD movie overall, really, but I have seen worse.
The audio offering is much more impressive. The DTS HD audio sounded good overall, and great in parts. Much like the movie itself, the audio is not outstanding, but it isn’t very bad either.
Additional Content
The Sentinel packs a good set of extra features. There are two features that last about twenty minutes combined that talk about the Secret Service and include some ‘making of’ insights from the cast and former Secret Service agents that acted as consultants. An audio commentary track with the director is included, as well as three deleted scenes and an alternate, but uninteresting, ending. My favorite extra however is the interactive scenes. There are only two, but this is a very interesting feature. Basically what you see is a split screen, with the finished film and the production shot shown, either of which you can enlarge. This is neat because you can not only see the finished scene, but also some real-time behind the scene footage.