Vantage Point

Reviewed By Rich Drees

     In picturesque Salamanca, Spain, the President of the United States (William Hurt) is on hand for a conference that would set-up an international effort to fight terrorism. At the conference’s public opening ceremony, the President stands to address the cheering throng when two shots ring out, striking him in the chest. Thus begins a race for the President’s security detail to try and catch the assassin or assassins before they make their escape.

     For the first two-thirds of its scant 90 minute run time, Vantage Point takes its viewers back and forth through the events leading up to and immediately after the assassination attempt on the president, experiencing it through the point of view of several of its main characters. Sigourney Weaver is a harried news producer dealing with seemingly untrained local cameramen and a rebellious field reporter more interested in reporting on the anti-American demonstrations outside the conference when the shots ring out. Dennis Quaid plays a member of the President’s security detail who had not fully recovered from taking a bullet for the Commander in Chief a year earlier. Forrest Whittaker is a tourist with a video camera, a man in the right place at the wrong time who becomes an Abraham Zapruder of sorts for the story.

     Some will invariably want to draw parallels to Akira Kurosawa’s classic Rashomon, but that would be a mistake. Rashomon presented an incident from three separate viewpoints, leaving the audience to decide which character, if any of the three, were reliable witnesses to what transpired. Here, the multiple viewpoints are used as a device to slowly reveal the larger tableau of the plot to kill the president. With each viewpoint, the audience’s perceptions of what is happening change, as does what they think they know about the allegiances and motives of many of the characters.

     The film’s final segment spills the remaining pieces of this cinematic puzzle on to the table, revealing the full extant of the terrorists’ plans and once again leaving the audience guessing about where certain characters stand. It is also host to a pell-mell and oft times bone crunching car chase through the streets of Salamanca. Heightened by some fast editing, this is the strongest of the action sequences in the film.

     But for all the skill in which it is revealed, the core plot of the film still turns out to be fairly standard thriller material. If it weren’t for the way the film is constructed, Vantage Point would be far more forgettable than it is. But despite this, the film still has a potentially high rewatchablity factor, as one can go back and find where smaller pieces of the puzzle were hidden in plain sight. This is one time where the triumph of style or substance is not necessarily a bad thing.