vantage point

The overlapping imagery during the opening credits of Vantage Point was probably the film's deepest and most interesting moment.

The film's premise-the assassination attempt of a United States president as seen through the eyes of eight different characters-is promising, but the execution is downright miserable. The film opens with Rex Brooks (Sigourney Weaver), an editing room director for a CNN-pastiche, who is in charge of covering the anti-terrorism convention in Salamanca, Spain at which the president (William Hurt) is speaking. The on-sight reporter (Zoe Saldana) banters with Brooks, firing one wannabe-snarky comment after the other ("Not everyone likes us here."). Brooks' segment concludes with the shooting of the president-a moment that comes across as desperately dramatic-and the film literally rewinds and begins with a new perspective.

The film then follows two of the president's bodyguards (Dennis Quaid and Matthew Fox), a family man (Forrest Whitaker) escaping marital issues, a local crowd-member (Eduardo Noriega) who knows more than he should and a few forgetable others.

After about the third rewinding, you're ready to vomit. The fundamental gimmick of the film (a timer at the bottom left of the screen) reveals egregious errors in timing-the president gets shot at entirely different times (12:20? 12:05? Miller Time?). The perspectives themselves are nowhere near unique and quickly become stale. The film relies on the same panning shot of the president walking through the crowd and being shot-a hypothetically cool parallelism that becomes obnoxious.

Despite the film's glaring inaccuracies and its, at best, two-dimensional characters, the plot still had a shot at lifting the film from terrible to poor. Alas, the filmmakers made sure to evenly distribute the crappiness. The film, probably realizing its own atrociousness, breaks its own formula and mashes together four different perspectives, resulting in a finale that proves to be laughably ludicrous.

Vantage Point attempts to achieve dramatic realism through time and point-of-view, but drops the ball on its 24-esque structure. It centers on an act of terrorism at an anti-terrorist convention, but fails to give a motive to the terrorists (we can only assume the vaguely Eastern-European thugs must not have gotten hugged enough as children). It has an incredibly talented cast, but provides the actors with characters akin to blocks of wood. Vantage Point is worthy of the speech the Principal gave to Billy Madison: "At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."