In “Vantage Point” director Pete Travis attempts to recreate the narrative structure of master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomom. Using this style the same event is told from many different perspectives. This is a risky attempt as the movie can quickly become repetitive and annoying, but if done successfully it can be quite a feat. Pete Travis achieves neither and the result is an ordinary film with a couple of exciting action scenes and a half-decent twist.

President Ashton (William Hurt) is in Salamanca, Spain attending an anti-terrorism summit. As he makes his way to the podium, he is shot. At his side are secret servicemen Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid) and Kent Taylor (Matthew Fox) who immediately begin looking for the shooter. In the crowd are a few suspicious people including Howard Lewis (Forest Whitaker), a tourist on his first trip to Europe who is fascinated by his new HD camcorder, Suarez (Saïd Taghmaoui) who strikes up a conversation with Howard Lewis, Enrique (Eduardo Noriega) a police office in charge of protecting the Mayor and Enrique’s lover Veronica (Ayelet Zurer). After the shooting, a bomb blows up the stage, and Barnes who has been out of service since taking a bullet for the president is left to piece all the clues together. This is the first perspective the one seen by the GNN news crew run by Rex Brooks (Sigourney Weaver). At this point the movie rewinds and re-starts, but now seen from another characters perspective with each perspective revealing a little more until all of the twists are finally revealed.

“Vantage Point” attempts an interesting concept, that ultimately fails when the movie becomes repetitive. By the third time you’ll be wishing they’d try something different. Audiences don’t want to watch the same thing over and over. They should have skipped the repetitive stuff and just focused on the bottom line of each character’s perceptual differences, but if they did this, movie would probably be thirty minutes long. Also the rewind process that was used to begin each new perspective was pretty lame. The audience at my theater were laughing and taunting every time it would happen. This didn’t help in keeping the mood of the film.

The only performance worth mentioning is that of Forest Whitaker. The only thing is that you could probably take his character completely out of the movie without affecting a thing. The car chase is reminiscent of the Bourne films and was cleverly done. The movie also has a couple of twist: One that’s pretty good and the other is flat-out dumb. In the end, you are left with an unsatisfactory ending and thinking what was the point?

Review By Brad Peterson
brad@smartcine.com

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