Vantage Point boasts a handful of actors we are happy to follow, thrown against a backdrop of loud bangs and fast cuts to keep us intrigued. Despite all that, the movie only convinces us that what appears fine on paper sometimes will not look as good on screen despite the director’s best efforts.
Writer Barry L Levy’s clever construct for a thriller no doubt had studio executives’ pulses racing with glee and helped assemble an eminently watchable cast. The premise is an assassination attempt on the US president seen through different perspectives, which affords us a better grasp of the events than the actual protagonists.
However, what is genuinely arresting the first time around, and adequately intriguing the second, becomes repetitive and even numbing by the denouement. Indeed, you may even feel as though you have been cheated into seeing a 23-minute short film blown out to an hour and a half.
The US president (William Hurt) is in the Spanish city of Salamanca for an international counter-terrorism summit. While delivering a speech on stage, he is gunned down. News crew producer Rex Brooks (Sigourney Weaver) is particularly shocked, sensing her moment to create TV history, that is until a bomb blast kills her reporter on the scene. Then the movie rewinds 23 minutes to show us the events from the viewpoint of Secret Service agent Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid). Then again, and again, and again. And then again. We are treated to the perspectives of a suspicious local police officer (Eduardo Noriega), a hapless American tourist (Forest Whitaker) and the president himself for what is a total of six punishing renditions of the same events. Sadly, what is genuinely arresting the first time becomes almost annoying by the time all the plot’s pieces are sewn together in the final installment. Matters are not helped by the fact that the puzzle’s clues are parceled so awkwardly (“Oh my God!” when something shocking happens off screen) that the audience will feel baited and manipulated, and rightly so.
Despite its premise involving the US president and terrorism, the movie stays apolitical throughout. It cannot engage the audience with any of its messages, simply because there are none, and depends instead on the energy and suspense it generates. First-time director Pete Travis manages that in the first half hour with his anxiety-inducing editing owing a lot to Paul Greengrass. Then the curiosity evaporates and the movie becomes a cinematic equivalent of a formulaic novel where you read on because you want to see the conclusion, but without deriving any satisfaction.
The script is too busy holding its tricky structure together and does not adequately develop its characters into believable human beings. The actors somehow acknowledge this with their performances, seemingly content to maintain the movie’s hysterical tone. Only Hurt registers adequately as a dignified authority figure. Lost star Matthew Fox is squandered as Quaid’s partner while Oscar-winner Whitaker is merely a superfluous plot instrument. All in all, you could do a lot worse than go and see Vantage Point, but with the marquee still boasting worthy titles from the recent awards season you could also do a lot better.
