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A Boom with a View

It's a beautiful day in sunny Salamanca, Spain, where the President of the United States is about to hold a summit on global terror. He is introduced to a packed crowd by the local Mayor who promises a world-changing event. The President approaches the podium, raises his arms in triumph and - BLAM! BLAM! - two shots ring out! The President falls to the stage, the secret service swarms. The President's been shot! It's mayhem as the crowd flees in panic. Then suddenly - KABOOM! - the stage itself explodes in a four-story ball of fire. What could have happened here?!

You can almost hear the pitch meeting that got "Vantage Point" - a gimmicky, point-of-view twisting thriller by director Pete Travis - the green light. "What a slam-bang opening!" The agents might have said. "Then what happens?"

It turns out a lot happens. But at the same time, not so much.

This opening salvo is told from within a mobile news van, where a team covering the event is led by a tough-as-nails Sigourney Weaver (always a pleasure to see Sigourney in action). Then, after the explosion, as the dust settles, the film rewinds. Literally. Back past the KABOOM, past the BLAM BLAM, past the opening sunny mastershot until finally, we're told, it's 23 minutes earlier. And now we're reliving the events, this time from the point of view of a secret service agent (Dennis Quaid). Yes, it's that kind of movie. You know the routine. From Akira Kurosawa's "Rashômon" (still the ne plus ultra of this technique) to "The Usual Suspects" to that short-lived TV series "Boomtown", it's the same story told again and again from multiple viewpoints. And ironically, it feels as though we've seen this movie before.

Writer Barry Levy creates a wide array of thin characters, each working within the strict confines of his over-engineered script. There's Mr. Quaid's just-back-on-the-job Agent Barnes, his longtime partner (Matthew Fox), a camcorder-happy American (Forest Whitaker), a shady local cop (Saïd Taghmaoui) and, of course, the President himself, played with why-can't-we-have-this-guy-in-the-White-House nobility by William Hurt. He actually says "we have global sympathy now, we have to use that." Mmm-hmm.

But for all these ingredients, "Vantage Point" never rises above its gimmick. If you're going to do the multiple POVs thing, then each viewpoint must add depth and richness to the overarching story - not just create another crumb of a cliffhanger. In "Vantage", the story is manipulated to be told in such a way as to leave the audience just out of reach of critical information - even when it's technically in the point-of-view of the character. That's just a cheat. And by the eighth time the film rewinds those 23 minutes, and the on-screen clocks ticks from 11:59am to 12:00pm, fans of TV's "24" are liable to go into withdrawals (where oh where is Jack Bauer when you need him?).

By the final act, "Vantage Point" gives up the point-of-view angle and starts wrapping things up. Bullets fly in a way that makes you think the screenwriter is simply getting rid of the characters he's done with. Amazingly, all this rewinding and replaying simply adds up to a climactic car chase which, though filmed in impressive "Bourne Supremacy" style, still doesn't end the story. There's one last unforgivable moment of baby-carriage-down-the-stairs peril that would sink the Battleship Potemkin (though somewhere Brian De Palma is giddy). And to cap it all off, we never actually find out what the plot was in the first place. Not that it really matters. The final irony is, though the events in the film take place over the course of about 23 minutes, "Vantage" itself feels a lot longer.