Monday, March 10, 2008

Vantage Point - Film Review

VANTAGE POINT (**1/2) - Starring Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, Forest Whitaker, William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Bruce McGill, Edgar Ramirez, Said Taghmaoui and Zoe Saldana. Directed by Pete Travis.

This is an interesting suspense thriller about an attempted presidential assassination, told from eight points of view. The first POV comes from Sigourney Weaver, a news director in the bus commanding the cameras as the US president comes to a podium in Spain to give a speech. He is suddenly shot.

The movie then rewinds and tells the same story from the POV of a Secret Service agent played by Dennis Quaid. We get a little bit more info, then ten minutes later, the movie rewinds again. And again. And again.... This can all be fine and dandy, but there was a crucial plot twist, one of the few not given away in the trailer, that I figured out in the first three minutes. And so as we kept rewinding, I can't say there were many surprises, especially the noisy, ludicrous climax.

The movie is buoyed by some of its cast. Weaver makes any movie better, but I was disappointed after Quaid's angle, she disappears for the rest of the film. Forest Whitaker, who looked like he was melting under the Spanish sun, has some good moments as an innocent bystander with a camcorder. There's other acting going on that's weak, such as Zoe Saldana's inability to capture what a TV journalist is like, and Quaid's on gruff-man auto-pilot here.

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