From every perspective, Vantage Point is a wholesale disaster. Director Pete Travis and screenwriter Barry Levy’s fractured political thriller was reportedly inspired by Rashomon, which means that the filmmakers don’t understand Akira Kurosawa’s classic, as instead of utilizing their multiple-viewpoint tale to investigate the unknowability of truth, they merely provide different angles on the same event – a presidential assassination at a Spanish peace conference – to generate dull mystery. Levy’s script is a monumentally cheap and absurd creation that elicits only dumbfounded disbelief, stacking inanities on top of illogicalities to erect a monument to cinematic suckiness. The camerawork is a pretentious mess (culminating in a laughable link-everybody final shot) and the performances (from, among others, Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox and Forest Whitaker) are universally clunky, though this last failing can be partially attributed to the third grade-level dialogue. Whether it’s a national security debriefing in which a presidential advisor claims that a suspected terrorist spent time in Darfur (an ethnic conflict largely devoid of international hired guns), or a blatantly ludicrous plot twist involving commander-in-chief doubles, Vantage Point is a work of stunning simplemindedness that insults its audience’s intelligence at every turn, never more so than during a climactic car chase in which Quaid’s secret serviceman violently crashes his car twice, and not only do airbags not employ (I guess they don’t have those in Spain), but he walks away from the second wreck in a still finely pressed suit.
Thank you, finally a review of this movie that I agree with.
I went a pre-screening of this and was churning in my seat after the third rewind. When Dennis Quaid's character uttered the brilliant line of, "I've got you sir." I almost tore the seat from its moorings.
However, everyone I went with liked it, others said they liked it. Even the movie critic at the paper I work for gave a favorable review. I thought I was taking crazy pills or something!
Thank you for the review that this movie deserves. I still think you are being a bit generous with the 'D' grade, however.
Posted by: Steve Mullis | March 05, 2008 at 11:53 PM
I have to agree, this is one of the worst films ever made and the thing is it takes it self seriously. If it was a spoof of 24 I could forgive. after stoppped laughing i was almost crying. Hideous but says a lot about audiences and society's general intelligence when it will probably make more than there will be blood
Posted by: Mark McConnell | March 13, 2008 at 06:24 AM
Yep, a poor film. Amongst all the other cliches there were some classic Hollywood-mag moments, Secret Service agents firing 20-odd rounds from a pistol without reloading, miraculously hitting their targets all the time, and of course the lead characters can't bleed. Oh dear...
Posted by: Tom Sweeney | March 15, 2008 at 07:16 AM
I disagree completely with the reviewer. Not only did I find "Vantage Point" to be an exciting and finely-crafted film, I enjoyed the shifting narrative viewpoint and didn't mind having to do a little thinking in order to keep up with the plot. I'm not particularly bothered by the idea of a U.S. President having a double -- that sounds like a good idea. My only problem with the movie was that the makers chose to sidestep taking a political stance and instead stuck to straight storytelling. I realize that devoid of a political point of view this film will not resonate philosophically but then it also will likely not fall out of style should the American political/social landscape change drastically in the future.
Posted by: Emmett Loverde | March 18, 2008 at 04:25 AM
I agree. The worst movie I have seen in recent years. I felt insulted, cheated and angry afterwards at the utter stupidity of the plotline, the illogical plotline. The filmmakers wanted us to believe that a group of terrorists willing to blow up hundreds of people would swerve their van violently to avoid hitting one girl (how did she get there in the first place, she was so far away and they'd been speeding) was probably the stupidest way to wrap up the movie.
Posted by: Bilguun M | March 20, 2008 at 12:37 AM
I very much agree with this review. I saw the movie yesterday, and it was incredibly violent, in fact, unneccesarily so. When you really think about, the U.S. government might have commisioned the movie to make people even more terrified of terrorism, which is not as present as the government would like us to believe. A horrible movie, and one that I would never recommend to anybody.
Posted by: Nolan Bishop | March 21, 2008 at 09:07 AM