BOTTOM
LINE:
A highly effective
action-thriller which tells its story in a refreshing, non-traditional
plot line.
THE
GOOD: There's a
lot to like about 'Vantage Point', with perhaps the most obvious
being that it lives up to its title. Rather than telling a straight
forward political thriller, we get instead the re-telling of the
same event from the point of view of eight different strangers,
each who end up connected to the main plot point which is the shooting
of the President of the United States at a speech in Salamanca,
Spain. It would have been easy to make this gimmick, the re-telling
of the story over and over again, a contrived and ultimately boring
approach but director Peter Travis does an exceptional job of building
tension and releasing new angles and information even though we
see the same base event over and over again. The strongest revelation
of course is that the President's double is actually the one shot,
but then it turns out the President gets targeted anyway at his
secret base in a hotel several kilometres away, with the terrorists
always being one step ahead. In the end, it takes one nervy Secret
Service Agent (Dennis Quaid) and an innocent bystander on holiday
(Forest Whitaker) to be the unpredictable parts of the equation
that bring the terrorists' plot undone. The action is fast and frantic,
never letting up for a second, with some razor sharp editing and
sound. Perhaps even stronger still is that there is no attempt to
explain exactly why the terrorists are doing what they're doing;
this is a film about how eight different people react to a catastrophic
event and as such there is barely any motivational or political
subtext which is actually a refreshing change. The idea that we
get thrown in to the situation without much explanation and leave
without much explanation is quite a strong, and different turn for
a film of this genre to take.
