Vantage Point with spoilers
April 22nd 2008 01:20
Category: No Category
Vantage Point promo poster
A great cast plays out the leadup and fall out of an assassination attempt on the US President (Willam Hurt) during an anti-terrorist summit in Spain. We initially see it in the control room of GNN's OB Van, where Sigourney Weaver plays a very credible News Director (I've worked with them before, she was spot on, except for a distinct lack of caffeine). Dennis Quaid has his less attractive cats-bum face on for his role as Special Service personnel Thomas Barnes, nervously back on the ropes after taking a bullet for the President 6 months earlier. His partner played by hunky Mathew Fox is keeping an eye out for him. The President is shot as he gives his address, and a bomb goes off in the square with thousands of panicking people trying to escape. We are given the film from the vantage point of a number of people starting with the News Director seeing it through the camera lens.
Each viewpoint feeds us a little more information until finally, we have an omnipresent sense of the whole thing through what is supposed to be the collective of terrorists involved. The premise is interesting....but...
Did you ever get a sense that a movie was written purely to justify the writer's satisfaction at seeing one scene come to life? It is only my opinion..but I couldn't help but feel that Vantage Point came to fruition when some screenwriter/director thought how cool it would be to have a huge chase scene where the police car is being chased, instead of being the chaser. That, and what if you could format and control an entire terrorist act with a Blackberry?
Yeah, I'm starting to imagine who this writer/director/producer might be because then there is the use of different character perspectives and time looping to show how all the perspectives fit into what amounts to be an enormous convoluted puzzle. He's young and funky and (he thinks) original and he likes and plays with modern technology an awful lot.
It's too perfect- too well constructed. The terrorists plan is apparently flawless but it raises too many questions. How can Secret Service people placed close to the President, be sleepers? If you're happy to kill thousands of innocent people, why would you brake for a random child standing in the middle of a street? Amongst thousands of people, how can three or four people accidentally come across the unusual combination of two other random people. How can Forrest Whittaker's character afford to travel to Europe when he has just broken up with his wife and pays maintainence on four kids? Why doesn't someone just give poor Dennis Quaid a laxative before he comes on set? Why is the audio so bad...to imitate the noise of a frightened, crowded city or to confuse the viewer until everything falls into place. Or is it just me?
It loses consistency by keeping strictly to each character's viewpoint and then wandering randomly to the viewpoint of the terrorist group, but keeping an ominpresent eye on things at the end. What I mean to say is, the viewer becomes accustomed to receiving small bits of information at a time, but then we have ALL the information dumped on us at once. It kind of ruins the feel of what they have set up throughout the movie.
Is it a good movie? Meh. It's fine for DVD, and it's PG13 so you can watch with whichever of your kids would be interested. But they'll be asking questions. Mark my words. Nobody can keep their face like Dennis does all through this film without everyone wanting to know why he doesn't just eat some fruit, for pity's sake.
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