For about half an hour, before the movie crashes and burns in a bonfire of exaggeration and stupidity overkill, Vantage Point shapes up as a nifty ride. Never heard of the director Pete Travis (though the name sounds familiar), but the guy knows how to pump the action pedal — hell, he floors it. A network TV unit, headed by Sigourney Weaver, is recording the event for posterity. A network friend of mine hated this scene (’Three people running an historic peace conference broadcast from a single production truck ON SITE? Nonsense.’) If you’re a stickler for pesky facts this is not the movie for you.
Anyway, Weaver is looking for something to ward off boredom, when — boom! someone takes a shot at the President and the building behind him blows up. For the rest of the movie, Travis rewinds the event from six different — cue the title — vantage points. There’s Dennis Quaid as a Secret Service agent modeled on Clint Eastwood’s In the Line of Fire character minus the complexity. Next to him is his boss (Matthew Fox, looking lost outside of Lost). And, look, over there, it’s last year’s Oscar winner Forest Whitaker as a tourist with a restless camcorder. By the end, Vantage Point is such a unholy mess of drooling sentiment and sloppy loose ends that you?ll hate yourself for being suckered in.
The film is set in Salamanca, Spain, but it was mostly filmed in Mexico; only some of the scenes were shot in Salamanca. Over a twenty-three-minute period, an assassination attempt on the President unfolds. The film loops through this period over and over, each time from the perspective of a different participant, adding a new piece to the larger puzzle with each loop.
Star(s) to watch : Dennis Quaid (”Frequency”, “The Day After Tomorrow”) as Thomas Barnes, & Matthew Fox (”Smokin’ Aces”) as Kent Taylor.
Genre : Drama, Thriller.
Release date : February 22, 2008
Rating : 8/10
Official website : http://www.vantagepoint-movie.com/index.php
Poster : http://movies-update.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/vantage_point-202𝗬.jpg
Trailer :
