Released: 5th March 2021
Length: 80 Minutes
Certificate: 15
Director: Julien Leclercq
Starring: Olga Kurylenko and Marilyn Lima
On both the silver and smaller screens, standalone thrillers can vary in terms of quality. Some make an impact with viewers; others stand out as being more throwaway than anything else. Sentinelle sits firmly in the latter category, being a poor show from top to bottom.
In Sentinelle we follow Klara (Olga Kurylenko), an interpreter for the French army who witnesses a suicide bombing in the Middle East. Traumatised by the explosion, she’s reassigned to France under the anti-terrorist Sentinel unit. When off duty, her sister Tania (Marilyn Lima) is assaulted on a night out and Klara ventures outside of her responsibilities to track down the perpetrators. Clocking in at a very short eighty minutes, the events of Sentinelle are woefully basic and incredibly weak in terms of engagement. The first major problem with the narrative is how disconnected it all feels; the opening has nothing to do with the rest of the film and instead serves a means to transition into the primary sequences in Nice. Rather than using this incident to thematically ground the proceedings, the plot instead pivots to a very uninspired revenge quest. It doesn’t help that the pacing of said motive is incredibly hackneyed; often the film will skip over escape sequences and abruptly ends scenes that could have delivered further character development. The film’s conclusion is especially awful, cutting to yet another location to resolve the narrative at the last minute.
Despite using a smaller cast, none of the characters in Sentinelle are really worth caring about. Olga’s efforts are passable, but all told she’s unable to carry a role where much of the emotion is heavily internalised. In fact, every performance feels unbelievably flat; the film’s focus on a dark subject matter doesn’t translate to its characters at all, the connections between them being almost non-existent. The closest Sentinelle comes to forming a bond is between Klara and her sister, but this is also neutered by the latter being placed into a coma for a good portion of the runtime. There needed to be more moments of the two grieving over what happened which would have added to the protagonist’s personal guilt. The other characters have nothing to them at all; there’s no camaraderie between Klara and her fellow soldiers and no wider impact on the setting. All told, the film has almost nothing to offer when it comes to getting the audience invested.
From a presentation standpoint, Sentinelle has a more introspective focus. It’s going for a slower, occasionally atmospheric tone with its slow-moving shots, muted colour palette and heavy use of an ambient soundtrack. While this does lay the groundwork for more reflective moments, it ultimately makes the film’s events even more uneventful. When the action does come into play, it’s so painfully average in both presentation and stakes; cutting is frantic and the stunt work is lacklustre at best. What’s rather baffling is how this supposedly highly trained protagonist often has her opponents get the drop on her at several points. This really drags down the believability of the set piece moments, making it difficult to care for Klara as she tackles those who brutalised her sister.
A horribly bland and hollow slog, Sentinelle’s attempt to create an action vehicle for Olga Kurylenko hits a brick wall. Much of the narrative threads feel disconnected, there’s nothing to bind the characters together and what little action there is utterly fails to thrill. Avoid this one like the plague.
Rating: 1.5/5 Stars (Bad)
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