Metacritic Movie Ratings
The Sentinel Reviews

A sample of reviews from critics across the country.

• 75

  out of 100

  Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert

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

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• 70

  out of 100

  Los Angeles TimesKenneth Turan

  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.

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• 63

  out of 100

  USA TodayClaudia Puig

  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.

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• 63

  out of 100

  ReelViewsJames Berardinelli

  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.

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• 60

  out of 100

  The Hollywood ReporterKirk Honeycutt

  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.

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• 50

  out of 100

  VarietyJustin Chang

  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.

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• 42

  out of 100

  Entertainment Weekly

  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.

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• 30

  out of 100

  The New York TimesStephen Holden

  The question is why. Why would a star of Michael Douglas's stature and intelligence attach himself to a Washington thriller as deeply ridiculous, suspense-free and potentially career-damaging as The Sentinel?

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• 30

  out of 100

  Wall Street JournalJoe Morgenstern

  I can't find much slack to cut the film, except to say that it's a potboiler cooked in an upscale Teflon pot.

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See all The Sentinel movie reviews at Metacritic.com