Theoretically a hot button film about the assassination of the President of the United States as viewed from eight different perspectives, Vantage Point has little to say… and shockingly even less to show. It’s a gimmick film, a story that continually rewinds backwards in order to tell a different story. Unfortunately it’s also one that’s been done before (and better) in films such as Hero, Run, Lola, Run and (I presume because, alas, I still have not seen it) Rashomon. Here the gimmick is used for no real purpose, because no matter how many times director Pete Travis retreats back to the beginning… we end up seeing the same damn footage time and time again. There is the bare minimum amount of story development here (one time through and you’ve got it) and Travis routinely picks the most inopportune time to implement his trick – right around the time we feel like we’re, you know, getting somewhere. Worse yet, there are no characters to the story. The secret service agent played by Dennis Quaid (awful) is the most fully-formed, but only because he’s the only one with an actual backstory. Everyone else is defined by how they’re costumed… Matthew Fox (Quaid’s partner), William Hurt (President), Forest Whitaker (tourist/cameraman), etc. Character motivations are barely considered, the film takes place in Spain (for what purpose we’re unsure), no one acts well and needless to say… it opened at #1 at the box office.
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