Vantage Point feels very much like what it is, which is to say a screenplay written by a television development executive turned debut screenwriter, in this case Barry L. Levy. A defanged political thriller in which much dry ice-manufactured fog is pumped around the “single truth” behind an assassination attempt on the president of the United States on foreign soil, the film unfolds over and over, from eight different points-of-view. Unfortunately, it’s so meticulous in its peddling of red herrings and inclusive in its conspiratorial underpinnings that it just becomes an exercise in tedium.

Set
in Salamanca, Spain, the story unfolds at a summit of world leaders at
which the American president (William Hurt) is set to unveil a bold new
anti-terrorist measure. Assigned to protect him are Secret Service
agents Kent Taylor (Matthew Fox)
and Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid, above left), the latter of whom is a recently
returned-to-work hero who’s already taken a bullet for his boss. When President Ashton is shot on stage in a large, public square, chaos
ensues. A bomb explodes outside the walled-off venue, and then another
larger explosion rips through the main platform. Among those present
are a reporter (Zoe Saldana), a local cop (Eduardo Noriega, above center), three
mysterious, whispering bystanders (Said Taghmaoui, Ayelet Zurer and Domino‘s Edgar Ramirez) and an American tourist, Howard (Forest Whitaker), who thinks he might have captured the shooter on his camcorder while videotaping the event for his kids back home.

Vantage Point — whose trailer can be glimpsed here — is an enterprise hamstrung from early on,
and thus its faults can be traced quite easily and non-fussily back to
the major cornerstones (writing and directing) of its rendering. The movie’s conceit affords the audience an aerial view of matters, but there’s no significant investigative mooring
(apart from two bits that Barnes glimpses in camera footage, which
apparently tells him everything he needs to know) to make the
actual forward-push of the narrative matter.

Director Pete Travis has previous experience with political violence; his debut film, 2005’s Omagh,
focused on the search for justice after a 1998 bombing in Northern Ireland, and picked up a few
festival prizes, though no Stateside distribution. Here, though, he’s
given a script that substitutes
whiz-bang car chases and cheap emotional gambits (a child imperiled,
standing in the middle of a busy road) in place of anything slightly
more interesting. That means, as the movie wears on, more and more jittery, Bourne-style-lite mayhem, with edits every one-half to one-third a second.

Vantage Point is essentially a single, episodic set piece of an episode of 24, stretched like taffy into a mad-dash exercise in button-pushing exploit-ainment.
The air-quote explanation of the entire plot basically distills down to
the line, “This war will never end,” which is offered up in a raspy,
death-rattle confession by one of the complicit terrorists. The
motivation (religious fanaticism? political disenfranchisement?
old-fashioned greed?) is never really explained, though we’re led to
believe it’s perhaps elements of all of these, as well as… blackmail?
Sorry, that just doesn’t pass the smell test.

To render all this carnage in PG-13 strokes seems additionally ludicrous,
and requires that Travis and editor Stuart Baird cut away from and
otherwise “stunt” (including a slight, stuttering-frame effect) more
than a dozen gunshots that are by implication lethal. Poor Dennis Quaid
tries, and is as much of an anchoring presence as the story will allow.
Vantage Point, though, has no unifying vision of purpose — either of its own, or the world at its center.

Housed in a regular Amray case, Vantage Point‘s DVD includes both widescreen and full screen versions of the film, plus a bonus digital copy for playback on PSP, PlayStation 3 or PCs. A trailer of the forthcoming Hancock automatically plays upon start-up, and other special features on the DVD include a genial and very informative audio commentary track with director Travis, as well as a deleted scene and a mock-serious “surveillance tape” which is actually a 40-second clip of Travis entering a room and discharging an ammo clip, in theory to show how he’d like the scene staged.

The biggest supplemental inclusion comes by way of a 27-minute making-of featurette, which includes interviews with most of the principal cast and crew, as well as producer Callum Greene. Though this segment sometimes needlessly dips into an affected fake video style, it does pack in a fair amount of information (e.g., Sigourney Weaver‘s character, a television news director, was originally written as a man, hence the name “Rex,” which they kept), along with all the expected back-slapping self-congratulation. There’s also a separate interview with screenwriter Levy, and a seven-minute look at the movie’s stunt work and effects, in which stunt director Spiro Razatos talks about the 15 cameras used to capture the big explosion, and the challenges of filming a car chase in Mexico City’s very narrow streets — especially when “closed for filming” doesn’t fully translate, south of the border. For another clip from the movie, click here. To purchase the film via Amazon, meanwhile, click here. D+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)