When I reviewed caper-flick Mad Money a month ago, I lamented the growing overuse of the extended flashback in film. It’s a surefire way to look artsy—start halfway in, then go back X days, months or years to explain how it all came about. What ensues is the Revenge of the Sith effect: There’s zero suspense, because we know the result. It’s like reading the last few pages of a novel first, and it’s boring.
Vantage Point features no less than five flashbacks to the same 23-minute event. At an anti-terrorism summit in Spain, U.S. President Ashton (William Hurt) is to give a keynote address to a crowd of people. Somehow, security breaks down. The president is shot. Two bombs go off. The story is told six times, each focusing on a different character (or group) to slowly sketch a picture of the truth behind the tragedy.
The success of a movie like Vantage Point is contingent on its central gimmick. But the retellings are shaky. What happens after the shots are fired and bombs explode is far more exciting than what happens before—yet again and again, about two screen-minutes after the event, we’re thrust back to 12:00 P.M. (to, in my theater, discontented audience-groans). For the first hour, the movie keeps threatening to get interesting before ditching you and returning to square one.
Eight characters take center stage at different points of the five retellings, including a presidential bodyguard (Dennis Quaid), his partner (Matthew Fox), a Spanish policeman (Eduardo Noriega), the terrorists and an American tourist with a video camera (Forest Whitaker). Each receives mediocre development and most are dull—except Whitaker, who stands out like a supernova among brown dwarf stars. As the meek Howard, Whitaker is moving in every scene, but has far too few of them. (So does the second-best actor: Hurt. Who decided to shut down the film’s twoOscar-winners for two-thirds of the running time?)
By the halfway mark, the retellings end and the action begins, centralized on a long, ludicrous car chase that goes beyond all suspension of disbelief. Still, it’s better than waiting for the bomb to go off again, and I found myself chewing on my pen nervously now that the end result wasn’t predestined. Quaid and Fox get to run around and yell PG-13 swears, the body count rises and a completely average action film arises that no longer has anything to do with vantage points.
I confess to having not seen Rashômon, the acclaimed 1950 Akira Kurosawa picture that Vantage Point’s funky chronology is based on, so I cannot compare. But I kept feeling a need to hear these characters tell their own stories rather than seeing the action from different camera angles. Perhaps Vantage Point would work better as a series of first-person narratives. Or it could be told with distorted recollections, like a certain fan-favorite episode of The X-Files.
Vantage Point can’t deliver on the promise of its trailer. It’s exciting at times, there are a couple interesting twists and Whitaker runs away with any scene he’s in. And, thankfully, it’s tight: only 90 minutes long. But that’s an hour of mostly dull indulgence followed by a half-hour of middling action. If that’s worth your ten bucks, be my guest.
Overall Rating: C+