Vantage Point

Vantage Point

"The President of the United States is in Salamanca, Spain, about to address the city in a public square. We see a plain-clothes cop, his girlfriend with another man, a mother and child, an American tourist with a video camera, and a Secret Service agent newly returned from medical leave. Shots ring out and the President falls; a few minutes later, we hear a distant explosion, then a bomb goes off in the square. Those minutes are retold, several times, emphasizing different characters' actions. Gradually, we discover who's behind the plot. Is the Secret Service one step ahead, or have the President's adversaries thought of everything?"

1 star

I had almost forgotten about this movie until I saw a preview for it coming up on the FX network this weekend. After re-watching about 10 minutes of the movie, I realized that I hadn't forgotten about it as much as I had intentionally blocked its lackluster existence from my memory. This movie is bad, like eye rolling bad. There are plenty of movies out there that are awful, but some of them are at least aware of it (American Pie 4,5,&6 I'm looking at you). But because a movie is aware of its shittiness, it doesn't take itself too seriously and sometimes it can actually pass for watchable fare. Unfortunately someone forgot to tell this to the filmmakers of Vantage Point because the movie's own pretentiousness does nothing more than add to the already copious amount of nails in this particular cinematic coffin.

Once again I was disappointed by a movie whose trailer looked bad ass. The premise seemed to have a lot of potential and the fact that the movie was set in Salamanca (where I studied for a summer) made this a movie I actually went to see in theaters. If only I had known . . .

The film, predictably, relies too heavily on the "replay gimmick". The assassination is basically a 10 minute segment that is replayed 8 times from 8 different perspectives. Had the plot been halfway intriguing or at least provided enough mystery to keep the audience engaged then maybe the movie could have been saved. Instead it's just dull, so much so that the audience I was with actually started laughing by the time the 5th replay started. It was clear we all knew that this was a piece of crap and the mood changed to everyone trying to guess in their heads just how much longer this exercise in futility was going to take to roll over and die. As you might have guessed, the "twist ending" wasn't a "twist" at all and had it come about 45 mintutes sooner, we would have all been a lot happier.

I'll go ahead and make a statement that I will stick by in ALL future reviews. There are only 2 movies out there that revolved around a distinctive narrative style and were still able to be thoroughly entertaining despite the fact that they contained relatively mediocre plot lines. Those film would be Pulp Fiction and Memento. Everything else, this movie in particular, just couldn't quite pull it off. I hate panning this movie so hard especially since Forest Whitaker is in it and I'm a big fan of his. But luckily he had the good sense to pass on directing this one so his sin was only limited to the acting arena.