“Vantage Point” has no point. It is a technique without a purpose and it feels as if it is rambling along rather than coming to any actual conclusion.
The premise is riveting enough. The president of the United States travels to Spain to sign an anti-terrorism treaty in a massive celebration during which he is assassinated. Unsurprisingly, the viewer is treated to numerous opinions about the War on Terror, all of which seem obvious and overtly ridiculous.
The big trick of the movie is that the 30 minutes of time between the president’s departure for the event and his assassination are repeated from different perspectives for the majority of the movie. Whenever this happens, the film is reversed, a clock is reset on the screen and the action starts again from a different person’s perspective. The first time this happened the audience was excited to see what new things it would learn from this different perspective. By the third time it happened, there was a noticeable groan. And by the sixth, yes, sixth time it happened, there was incredulous laughter from all around the theater.
This repetitious technique isn’t necessarily bad. It’s been used for more than 50 years since the Japanese film “Rashomon” invented it, and more recently has been used effectively in “Run Lola Run.” The problem is with how it is used, and here the movie fails.
Each perspective reveals new details about the assassination and includes plenty of great surprises, but these are negated by the overwhelming amount of repetition in each version. At least 10 minutes of every perspective is practically identical to the others, meaning the viewer has to see the same 10 minutes of film six times. And in a 90-minute film this becomes unbearable.
The movie is directed by first-timer Pete Travis, and maybe this is the problem, but it seems more the fault of an editor who refused to cut out the unnecessary parts.
The performances themselves are satisfactory. Sigourney Weaver is fantastic but wasted in a ridiculously short role as a cable news producer. And Dennis Quaid and Forest Whitaker are both very good but unmemorable. The only poor performance of the whole movie is Matthew Fox, whose role as a Secret Service agent is almost laughably bad.
The action scenes were also fairly impressive, yet somewhat ludicrous. It’s enjoyable to see tiny cars streaking through European streets, but this kind of action has been overused in the past few years. It’s even less entertaining to see people get slammed by these cars and then get up and run even faster. There is a complete lack of reality in these chase scenes, and after a while it becomes frustrating.
It is a film of impressive moments, both of acting and action, scattered throughout a repetitive and increasingly ridiculous landscape. Hopefully this interesting technique will be used again soon by a better movie.
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‘Vantage Point’ fails to find a point in its repetitive plot device
Daily Emerald
February 24, 2008
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