View Lots of Coincidences from a Different Vantage Point
by quasar - Written: Aug 26 '08 (Updated Aug 26 '08)
Product Rating:
Pros: very interesting format, Quaid, acting generally
Cons: relies much too heavily on coincidence, Spanish sections feel disruptive
The Bottom Line: I wish they'd come up with a better way to tie the whole story together that made more sense and only needed one or two small coincidences to work.
I somehow missed Vantage Point in the theater. In some ways that's too bad as thrillers almost always play to their best advantage on the big screen. In other ways that's fortunate because this is a movie that I found myself rewinding frequently to rewatch specific scenes to get the most information from them. You see, this movie is a big puzzle told in pieces and only fully understandable once you've fit each bit of information gathered during each segment together into a cohesive whole.
The president of the United States is giving a speech in a large, crowded plaza in Salamanca, Spain when a gunman hidden in one of the nearby buildings shoots him twice. We see these events unfold repeatedly, first from the viewpoint of a news control room watching on multiple screens, then from the vantage point of a secret service agent, then a Spanish cop, an American tourist with a video camera, the president, and finally the assassin and his cohorts. Each time run from noon - a couple of minutes before the shootings - to some point afterward, moving further and further along with each iteration of the events until the final run shows us what really happened in its entirety.
The same characters float in and out of the different views of events. Sometimes it's clear what they're doing from the start and other times we learn information in later versions of the events that completely change our understanding of what's going on and the role each major player has in the story. The plot is complex and interesting and this format certainly milks every last drop of drama out of it. At the same time, this layered process is a bit disjointed and a few of the revelations in later runs seem to come completely out of left field. Nothing overly contradicts anything seen in earlier versions of the story and it does all fit together into a plot worthy of a twisty thriller, but the revs also bring in too much new information and, in the end, the story as a whole depends much too heavily on coincidences. The biggest reveal of them all relied on the coincidence of being in a particular unexpected location at precisely the right time which really bothered me and the final ending of the film was so dependent on several simultaneous coincidences that I wanted to scream at the screen.
Two of the iterations of the story are told fully or partially in Spanish with subtitles. I found that a bit distracting. I realize the movie takes place in Spain and that some of the characters are Spanish and would naturally be speaking that language, but I found those scenes more difficult to follow and they seemed to break up the flow of the movie quite a bit since they felt considerably different from the iterations of the story surrounding them.
This movie has a surprisingly strong cast featuring Dennis Quaid as the focal secret service agent, William Hurt as the president, Forrest Wittaker as the tourist with the camera, Sigourney Weaver as the producer of the on-site news coverage, and Matthew Fox as another secret service agent working the case. Quaid is, as always, fantastic and everyone else fades into the woodwork whenever he's on screen. The other actors - both those mentioned here and all of the others - generally do a fine job, but Quaid is the only real standout.
Vantage Point features car chases, lots of guns and explosions, and much misdirection. It presents it all in an unusual format, one that gives the movie a unique look and feel beyond your typical action flick. I think the format works better in theory than in practice, but it added an extra dose of drama to the proceedings. The only really unforgivable sin of this movie was its significant reliance on coincidence. I was enjoying the movie until the last couple of iterations started relying on fluke after fluke. I wish they'd come up with a better way to tie the whole story together that made more sense and only needed one or two small coincidences to work. As things stand, this story is not believable and that turns it from a sharp thriller into a disappointing attempt at a compelling movie.
A presidential assassination attempt is told from multiple points of view in Pete Travis's directorial debut, VANTAGE POINT. U.S. president Ashton (Wi...More at Zappos.com
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