The Sentinel (2006) -vs- In the Line of Fire (1993)

Review by Bryce Zabel 

Secret Service agents have been around, we're told in The Sentinel, for 141 years. Both our defending champion and the challenger deal with that world and how the agency's history affected their lead characters and how it comes to a head during a present-day case.

Each one features an aging agent who took a bullet or thinks he should have taken a bullet in a famous presidential assassination. Back in 1993's In the Line of Fire, it was Clint Eastwood playing Agent Frank Horrigan who was working Dallas detail that day that JFK was shot and killed. This year in The Sentinel, it's Michael Douglas playing Agent Peter Garrison who actually did take a bullet 25 years ago on the day that wacked-out John Hinckley shot President Ronald Reagan.

The Sentinel also has Keifer Sutherland in the mix and if you're a fan of his series 24, then you're likely to have moments when it feels like Jack Bauer's on the job again.

Listen up! My dad was more famous than your dad and that's a stone fact!

Like the Rene Russo female agent character in In the Line of Fire, Eva Longoria's also along for the ride in this latest film but she's only window dressing because the action and the drama belongs to Douglas and Sutherland. You see, they used to be the best of friends, but Douglas may have slept with Sutherland's wife and that's left him pissed off. Finally, now that Douglas's character is suspected of being a treasonous mole and Sutherland's character is in charge of the investigation, things can get nasty between them.

This leads us to one of the big differences in the two films. In the Line of Fire has a central relationship, too, but it's between Clint Eastwood's character and a villain, Mitch, played by John Malkovich. If you believe that suspense thrillers are only as good as their villains, then the 1993 film is ahead on points even now because Malkovich, working with the material from a Jeff Maguire screenplay, creates one of the truly unforgettable villains in screen history.

How did you know I was out drinking till 4 in the morning the day JFK  got it?

There's not a doubt that In the Line of Fire is a great film. I found myself thinking that The Sentinel had a shot at being a great film, too, as it began to tell its story. But about half-way through you begin to realize that it's not going to have the guts to have one of these two leads be a traitor and so the villain is somebody minor in the picture and like a conventional buddy picture, Sutherland and Douglas are going to get together and catch whoever that person is. That's exactly what they do in an overblown and improbable shoot-em up. I've produced three TV action series in Canada and, inevitably, our Act Four action sequences always seemed to end up with a fight in a warehouse and this didn't seem to be much different than that.

So, although I loved to see Michael Douglas and Keifer Sutherland in action, and The Sentinel gives them good, solid characters, it's just not special in the way that watching Clint Eastwood and John Malkovich match wits was.

The Sentinel seems to be the perfect movie to rent or download someday. If you see it in the theater now, you'll have a good enough time but you won't be thinking about it a week later. In the Line of Fire is a movie I'm still thinking about today.