I honestly wanted to like Sentinelle. Not for its core plot which has been done many… many… many (many) times before… but because the movie wanted to turn that plot into something more grounded, more serious. But just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should… or doesn’t mean you should if you don’t have the script or the skill.

So Sentinelle is about a female French soldier who returns home after a traumatic tour in the Middle East. Back at home, she suffers from PTSD and sometimes acts out. But she winds down by going out clubbing with her sister… who is promptly brutalized and left in a coma by Russian goons (with diplomatic immunity!). When the police can’t help, she decides to use her certain set of skills to get revenge.

Like I said, generic plot. But what this movie tries to do is give us a realistic on-edge character who wants to take revenge but is certainly not Keanu from John Wick or Charlize from Atomic Blonde. She makes mistakes, she gets winded in a fight, she loses sometimes too. Because these aren’t superheroes who can take a dozen punches and shrug off bullet wounds.

But sadly that doesn’t make it a very entertaining movie. It COULD have taken that premise and made a better a movie out of it but the limp approach they took just lacked excitement or drama. Because the action was so abbreviated, this very short film had to spend a LOT of time trying to develop its character and give us a lot of dialog… both of which should have been better handled than they were.

To be very fair, Olga Kurylenko plays the soldier and she’s actually very good. Her portrayal of an on-edge soldier with PTSD (and a little boredom) is solid. I have no complaints about her… just what she was asked to do.

So what it comes down to is a noble effort to create a more grounded version of something like John Wick, Taken, or any number of other revenge thrillers. I kept wanting to enjoy the movie but it kept letting me down.

Score: 69