‘Sentinel’ Lets Down Its Guard to Cliches

The buzz-haired, thick-jawed, Marine-like hero of “The Sentinel” spent 1 1/2 years in a Peruvian rain forest, during which he somehow developed super-senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch that he now employs as a police detective.

Even with all that hypersensitivity, however, he’s unaware that the new UPN series he’s in is a clunker.

“The Sentinel” begins promisingly. Jim Ellison (Richard Burgi) is introduced as a dark, brooding, interestingly cerebral and mysterious character who is as puzzled as we are by his amazing abilities, which, it’s announced, hark back to the “mythical sentinel” of pre-civilized cultures. He emerges from the forest as the lone surviving member of a U.S. military reconnaissance team, then a few years later resurfaces as a crackerjack cop in a place called Cascade, Wash., pursuing a terrorist bomber known as the Switchman.

*

At this point, with Burgi soberly underplaying Ellison as a perplexed, vulnerable protagonist, “The Sentinel” is still swimming in intriguing murkiness. Inevitably, though, formulaic TV intervenes. Ellison acquires a funny little crime-fighting pal in hippie-like anthropologist Blair Sandburg (Garett Maggart)--will these two opposites ever be able to work together?--and reunites in an intimate way with his ex-wife, police forensics expert Carolyn Plummer (Kelly Curtis), en route to a weak plot payoff that has you lamenting that the Switchman didn’t detonate the script.

Still worse is next week’s preposterous tale, which finds Ellison and his boss, Capt. Simon Banks (Bruce A. Young), on a bold, two-man mission against a gang of ruthless terrorists who have occupied police headquarters and taken hostages to force the release of two of their jailed comrades. Why not occupy the White House too?

This violent lunacy might work with a comic super-villain a la Batman, but the terrorist chief here is such a humorless yutz that you feel like a double-yutz just for watching.

* “The Sentinel” premieres at 8 tonight on UPN (Channel 13).