Over the past few months, if you have set foot inside a theater you have seen the trailer for Vantage Point, complete with the now infamous line, "Stop...rewind that," delivered with perfect intensity by Dennis Quaid. The way the trailer took over nearly every screen, it could only mean one of two things: the studio has that much confidence in the film or they are hoping a ton of promotion will cover up a poor film. Are either of these true? In reality, probably not. In actuality, not really.
This is one theory that failed to pan out, at least in my experience with the film. I guess the question then becomes if Vantage Point is worth spending time with or not. Even that answer is not so easy to answer as the film lies somewhere in between excellence and excrement. That is a bit extreme, but it makes the point. Advertising and preconceptions never tell the whole story.
The structure of Vantage Point can best be described as Rashomon and Run Lola Run having a head-on collision, with this new film as the resulting wreckage. It has neither the greatness of the former, nor the relentlessly infectious energy of the latter. While it does not measure up favorably to either of those films, it may be unfair to compare them. There is something of a shared structure, but they each have distinctly different goals. Vantage Point is dead set on providing an intricate puzzle with a number of players in a high octane thriller. The film never lets up, forcing you to watch everything so as to catch all of the pieces.
The basic plot has the President (William Hurt) being shot just before delivering a speech in Spain about a new plan to unify countries on five continents in the war on global terror. What follows are the events in the 20 minutes leading up to the shots being fired and their immediate aftermath.
We get to see these events from the perspectives of all the major players. These players include the news agency covering the event, the secret service agent (Quaid) protecting the President, a tourist (Forest Whitaker) recording the event to show his kids, a Spanish cop who has multiple reasons for being there, as well as a couple more involved in the actual event rather than victims of the aftermath. All of these angles come to a head in an explosive climax where everyone is revealed to everyone else and it is a race against time.
It is within these rewinds and replays that some of the movie's major problems exist. By the time we get into the extended finale, it is already losing steam. The audience has grown weary of the same sequence events over and over again. I could tell the audience I was in was growing a bit restless by the time the third rewind came around.
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