No Matter Which Way You Look At It, Vantage Point Disappoints

“Wow...” is a pretty adequate summation of my thoughts after seeing the trailer for Vantage Point last October. Pity, though, that the “wow” changed from extreme amazement to extreme disappointment—and by extreme I mean as disappointing as the Oscars for a person who’s not a fan of the Coen Brothers. Perhaps it was even more so, because while No Country For Old Men’s Oscar-snatching was hardly a surprise, Vantage Point is the epitome of unmet expectations.

The movie tells a story of the assassination of the American president attending a forum on terrorism in beautiful Salamanca, Spain. Before he even gets to say a word, the commander in chief is gunned down by terrorists. So far so good, especially considering the dearth of good political thrillers on the horizon lately. The cast—though not your usual blockbuster ensemble—is also attention-grabbing. Last year’s Academy Award-winner Forest Whitaker accompanies Sigourney Weaver, Dennis Quaid, and William Hurt. The story of the assassination is told from five different perspectives of five different members of the crowd gathered in Salamanca: the news reporter (Weaver), a Secret Service agent (Quaid), and an innocent tourist who just happens to have a movie camera (Whitaker), among other perspectives.

The narrative strategy was the film’s main draw and something I fully expected to make it captivating, fresh, and, frankly, good. As opposed to Akira Kurosawa’s cult hit Rashomon, though, the presentation of different vantage points breaks, rather than makes, the film. Kurosawa’s characters each provide a different version of a murder that occurred, making the film an intriguing quest for the truth. Vantage Point, however, literally retells the same story five times, giving about 20 minutes of screen time to each of the characters, and each time rewinding the clock to the very same beginning scene. Unfortunately, the onlookers don’t have different points of view or perceptions of what happened. Rather, they serve as wooden and hardly believable vehicles for delivering cues about the “truth” behind the crime to the audience.

The problem is that, after seeing Hurt fall for the third time, the audience doesn’t even care anymore. The first half hour of the film is engrossing and exciting, but these two qualities seem to be inversely proportional to the number of perspectives presented. After laboring through what feels like watching almost the same film five times in a row, even a Bourne-style car chase scene fails to increase the viewer’s pulse. All in all, no matter how you look at it, Vantage Point just doesn’t hold up.