At first glance, this film looks like the Keifer Sutherland series 24 for the big screen. With the focus on a plot to assassinate the President of the United States, a race against time, and plenty of Secret Service agents, the agency under the spotlight in The Sentinel.
But wait, the protagonist turns out to be Michael Douglas' character Pete Garrison instead, a veteran Secret Service agent famed for taking the bullet for Reagan in 1981. The SS agents are specially trained to "take the bullet", which is what makes them special - who in the right mind will put themselves in the line of a bullet and a target? But Garrison gets implicated in the assassination plot, and has to run for his life while at the same time doing his bit of investigations into the plot. All this because of his failure in a polygraph test, due to his adulterous banging of the First Lady (Kim Basinger). Tsk.
There are shades of Clint Eastwood's In the Line of Fire. Both featured aging actors, and aging veteran has-been heroes with a bit of a historical reference, who took the bullet in their respective tours of duty. While Eastwood's movie has a more enigmatic villain in John Malkovich, The Sentinel suffered from its lack of a central strong villain, preferring to share the assassination responsibility amongst many forgettable ex-KGB villains, and the mole within the Presidential Detail. With Douglas on the run from the law, he becomes similar to Dr. Richard Kimble of The Fugitive, hunting the proverbial one-armed man while at the same time, relying on his smarts to outwit fellow agents, which turned out to be quite interesting to watch - despite slick processes, it still boils down to the performance and gullibility of individual agents.
Keifer Sutherland and Eva Longoria, top TV stars of today from 24 and Desperate Housewives, get relegated into support roles as the Secret Service investigators who are looking into Garrison's probable involvement in the assassination plot, and at times seem to have lept off the pages of CSI with their forensics skills. The beautiful couple had chemistry that could have resembled X-Files' Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, but alas these two had very little to do here. We know the reason why they're in the movie, and that is to get their fans into the theatres. Also, Longoria's role seemed unable to shake off her sexy-mama Gabrielle, and here, has her in fairly low cut blouses (Sutherland actually tells her to cover up) and tight pants (ogle-fest for fellow agents).
Nonetheless, it's still a pretty interesting look into the lives of probably the most highly charged and tense protection detail in the world, and the typical threats that they face daily, including the following up on every nutcase's threat on the life of the most powerful man in the world. It's a decent suspense and investigative thriller, with enough subplots to keep you entertained. But one thing though, like most ending action sequences, this one has a big enough loophole for you to fly a jumbo jet through.

No one goes to a movie like The Hills Have Eyes 2 and expects the second coming of Citizen Kane. The same is true for the majority of low-rent horror flicks, especially those Roger Ebert has dubbed "Dead Teenager Movies." The Hills Have Eyes 2 definitely qualifies as a Dead Teenager Movie, only here, the teenagers have been given the superficial appearance of military trainees.
Some will argue the line "it's only a movie" when questionable facts are raised in a movie review, but I've always been a firm believer that all good fantasy must be rooted in reality in order to be effective. In the Hills Have Eyes 2, we're to believe the main characters are military people on a training exercise, but they look and talk like high school kids camping in the desert. The dialog is awful and frequently vulgar to excess. Though the films aren't nearly comparable, I kept imagining these "soldiers" being in Platoon, and shuddering with dread.
Very little about the characters evokes a soldier other than rifles and fatigues: radio transmissions are carried out like teenage phone conversations; a Colonel is addresses as "hey, asshole" by a Private. And nobody seems to have the slightest idea what to do, or any sense of command structure, when things begin to go wrong. I think of the soldiers in James Cameron's Aliens, a film of pure fantasy, and how even those futuristic Marines behaved like real soldiers despite their fantastic situations. Fantasy rooted in reality.
I try to begin watching a movie as a 5 on a scale of 10, and judge it's strengths and weaknesses from there. You have to allow concessions for the material; there's no way Star Wars is as good of a movie as The Godfather, on equal terms. But both are excellent examples of their type.
In that respect, while the Hills Have Eyes 2 is a pretty dreadful exercise in amateur and immature writing, it's only modestly worse in that regard than the typical Dead Teenager Movie. On a technical side, the movie appears to have decent production values and is pretty well made from that perspective. Scenes that are intended to shock, or which are intended to evoke urgency or suspense generally work. So, while watching The Hills Have Eyes 2 may indeed be a fate worse than death, there are certainly far worse horror flicks in circulation.
It's worth a watch for those who enjoy this type of stuff without the usual fanboy baggage, or those who don't tend towards thinking every movie they see is either the Best Ever or the Worst Ever of all time. If you don't "get" horror, especially the Dead Teenager variety, you're not likely to have a good time with this one.
4/10