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Directed By
Pete Travis, Pete Travis
Written By:
Barry Levy
Cast:
Zoe Saldana, Matthew Fox, Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt, Forest Whitaker, Dennis Quaid, Richard T. Jones, Edgar Ramirez, Said Taghmaoui, Eduardo Noriega, Leonardo Nam, Penelope Kaufer, Brian McGovern, Ayelet Zurer, Dolores Heredia, Shelby Fenner, Rocío Verdejo, José Carlos Rodríguez, Rodrigo Cachero, Justin Sundquist, Ari Brickman
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Vantage Point (2008)
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Movie Review by Mike 
January 8th, 2009
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Better Than the Trailers
Looking at the trailers for Pete Travis' thriller "Vantage Point", you're led to believe that it's a tangled mess of a movie. "Eight different people - eight different perspectives" Peaugh!
Not being a real big thriller fan, I watched "Vantage Point" because, frankly, I had nothing else better to do. The movie starts pretty routinely, with Dennis Quaid as an on-edge Secret Service agent, back from recovery after taking a bullet for the President of the United States, played with subdued confidence by William Hurt (in contrast to the dumbed-down, Bush-like President David Quaid played in "American Dreamz", which I ashamedly admit to watching - but I digress).
The President is in Spain to negotiate a multi-national anti-terrorist initiative, and today is the day where all the countries' officials converge for the Big Meeting. After a few introductory niceties, the President is introduced - then things go South.
The President is shot, the grandstand explodes, and a central building in this massive plaza goes up, Oklahoma Compound-style. From those three events, the rest of the movie takes you around the plaza where terrified onlookers are running frantically, to get the vantage point (get it?) from people in the crowd. Forest Whittaker as a vacationer videotaping the proceedings, Sigourney Weaver and Zoe Saldana as TV director and correspondent, respectively broadcasting the event on live television, Edgar Ramirez as a police officer assigned to protect the mayor of the city. Others include Ramirez's girlfriend, whom he catches being confronted by a sinister-looking Arab, and so on. Each character builds on the three events until the ultimate plot is revealed.
And what is the ultimate plot? Of course I'm not going to tell, but it makes a very important point about the true mechanics of terrorism. To me, terrorism is similar to a magician, where diversion and distraction are the tools used to make the illusion work. Every time another character's perspective of the three events are shown through their eyes, the purpose for the three events change. "Why" quickly disappears as a point of interest to "How". And that was the magic of the plot. Too often Americans underestimate terrorism, trying to predict it as though trying to predict the weather. True terrorism, as it's shown in this movie, shows that desperate people are not the wild-eyed, crazed lunatics as stereotyped in American action movies, but calculated soldiers using "Mission Impossible" diversion tactics to distract you until it's too late. However, this being an American movie made in Hollywood, it is the unexpected twist of fate that turns the disaster into the expected Hollywood Ending. That's all I'll divulge. The Good Guys ultimately win.
One annoying ploy the director used throughout the movie was not showing the audience what prompted a character to suddenly bolt off, leaving the rest of us screaming, "WHAT DID YOU SEE? WHAT DID YOU SEE???", which, of course you did finally see, but not until much later in the movie. There was also an unnecessarily long car chase, but I think it's canon law to have a car chase in every thriller. It was too long, though, as if the director ran out of story and needed to fill to get his projected viewing time. There were also some decent performances from Bruce McGill as as advisor to the President (more fondly remembered as D-Day from "Animal House. He'll never escape that part, no matter how many other solid performances he may churn out), and Zoe Saldana (Lt. Uhura on the J.J. Abrams' "Star Trek" movie), as a TV correspondent.
So what started as a time filler turned out to be a decent 90 minutes of screaming at the television, and trying to put all the pieces together to make a thoroughly enjoyable movie.
With a too-long car chase.
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 | Zara
Jan 8, 2009 8:20 PM
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| Good review, Mike. I've been meaning to check this movie out. |
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