From translator to vigilante

From translator to vigilante

Trending on Netflix, French flick Sentinelle is short and suffers from a poorly written script and generic fight scenes

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
From translator to vigilante
Olga Kurylenko as Klara in Sentinelle. (Photos © NETFLIX)

Currently featuring on Netflix's daily Top 10 chart is action-thriller Sentinelle, starring French actress and former Bond girl Olga Kurylenko as a traumatised interpreter for the French army who has returned home from the Middle East and finds herself going against the law to hunt down the people who raped her younger sister.

Directed by Julien Leclercq, Sentinelle is another film based on revenge as it is one of the more popular themes in the action genre. So, if you've seen movies like Taken (2008), The Equalizer (2014) or John Wick (2014), this movie fits into that sub-genre. While it's relatively short at 80 minutes -- which means it can be watched to just pass time without too much commitment -- Sentinelle still feels like another half-baked work that suffers from a poorly written script and generic fight scenes.

The plot follows the life of Klara (Kurylenko), a soldier who served in Syria as an interpreter for the French army, before being transferred home to Paris after a traumatic event. Besides reuniting with her family, Klara is also reassigned to a unit known as Project Sentinelle, whose main task is to patrol areas susceptible to terrorist attacks, and this means observing public spaces. Although she's trying to rebuild herself and move on in life, something happens after a night out to a club where Klara's sister Tania (Marilyn Lima) is involved in a tragic attack and goes into a coma. As a result, Klara decides to take matters into her own hands -- despite the fact that she's employed by the French military -- as she tries to investigate what happened to her sister and find out who's responsible for her condition.

Being that this is an action-thriller with lots of intense drama and different action scenes, I went in expecting it to take you straight into fast-paced action and engaging drama in terms of character development. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. The film starts out quite slow and the actual conflict in this movie kicks in at about the 30-minute mark, which is odd because that means there's just less than an hour remaining. That being said, once the actual conflict begins, the movie follows the well worn path that most action flicks take.

The main character, Klara, is disturbed and has an obsession for vengeance without a solid reason. There's nothing wrong with Kurylenko's performance as she plays a soldier with PTSD fairly well despite having little to work with. We know that she's a victim of trauma and she turns to other things to hide from her emotions, however, the story doesn't really delve deep into her psyche or give us enough of her background to allow any sort of connection to be built with her character. While I wanted to root for Klara, I wasn't clear why I was rooting for her other than out of a sense of justice.

The storyline throughout just doesn't make sense. It's messy, riddled with clichés, and features conventional dialogue. Other characters in the film were also poorly written and have no development. I felt like the movie could have used a solid supporting character that's fleshed out just to complement Klara, so that we could see a different side of her. When it comes to the action element, I think it's pretty generic and few and far between. So, please don't expect something frenetic like Taken or the John Wick series because the way the action is choreographed here is bad and feels very amateur.

Also, much of the plot is predictable too. This may be typical for many action movies but the ending was just too obvious. Sentinelle may be a quick watch but there are also certainly better things out there to spend your time on.

  • Sentinelle
  • Starring Olga Kurylenko, Marilyn Lima, Michel Nabokoff
  • Directed by Julien Leclercq
  • Now streaming on Netflix
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