Much has been written lately about the way
films related to the Iraq war and terrorism have failed to find traction with
American audiences. Some blame war fatigue, others the middling quality of the
films being produced, but the real problem may be a question of political
courage: Whether they're about soldiers coming home, dead or alive (Home Of
The Brave, Grace Is Gone, In The Valley Of Elah), or reviving fantasies of American might (The Kingdom), the discussion is more
around the War On Terror than actually about it. Even by those meager
standards, political thrillers don't get much more craven and shallow than Vantage
Point, a
gimmicky Rashomon-like
take on an assassination, unfolding from multiple perspectives. With the whys
behind the shooting of an American president at an anti-terror summit rendered
completely irrelevant, all that remains is a toothless whodunit, constructed
like an episode of 24 that keeps looping back on itself.
Told from eight different points of view, Vantage
Point
takes place around a crowded square in Spain, where the president (William
Hurt) is scheduled to deliver a summit-opening speech. After he's riddled with
gunshots on his way to his podium, the film sorts out the puzzle by looking at
the individual pieces: Dennis Quaid and Matthew Fox, two Secret Service agents
who grew close after Quaid took a bullet for the president months earlier;
Forest Whitaker, an American tourist who picks up a lot of information on his
palm-sized HD camera; Sigourney Weaver, the cynical director of a cable-network
newscast; Eduardo Noriega, a plainclothes Spanish policemen with ties to the
city's mayor; and other potential good and bad guys.
The loaded cast does what it can with the
paper-thin characterizations, but Vantage Point gets hijacked early by
its high-concept premise, and it quickly devolves into a by-the-numbers
thriller with the numbers out of order. Pete Travis' previous film, Omagh, brought a real
historical tragedy to life with no-frills conviction, but perhaps that's owed
to the influence of writer-producer Paul Greengrass, who mastered this brand of
docu-style immediacy with Bloody Sunday, United 93, and the last two Bourne movies. Here, Travis
dutifully pastes the story-shards together, but he and the actors are hamstrung
by a script that's so busy piling on the twists that it never pauses to
consider what they mean.