Movie Review - 'Vantage Point'

Vantage Point

Starring Dennis Quaid, Forest Whitaker, and Matthew Fox
Directed by Pete Travis
Rated PG-13

Vantage Point is not exactly as it’s advertised. The trailers and TV ads want you to believe that eight people in a crowd of thousands witness a presidential assassination but they all see things a little differently. The resulting movie would, theoretically, show you where those perspectives differ, filling in the gaps in the picture along the way until you reach one crystal clear truth.

It’s a technique that has been used forever. To a degree, Citizen Kane used it, although not to concentrate on one specific incident but rather the private life of a public figure. The most classic example of this filmmaking technique is 1950’s Rashomon, by the legendary director Akira Kurosawa. In that film, an attempt to get to the truth of a rape and murder are made using the accounts of witnesses, including the victim herself, contacted through a medium. The movie is told as a flashback within a flashback, because additional characters are telling the story about the witness accounts.

The point of the exercise is that the truth is very fluid depending on your point of view, or in this case, your vantage point. Psychologists even coined the phrase “The Rashomon Effect” used when witnesses differ on the nature of events that unfolded in front of them. The JFK assassination would make an example.

But Vantage Point doesn’t show different versions of the same episode. It’s the same episode, yes – the shooting of the American President (William Hurt) while giving a speech overseas – but the accounts all match up. Each witness has his or her own entry and exit points, but the events and the interpretation of them are basically unchanged. The gunshot came from the same place in every account, so that all that remains is a whodunit.

It’s a lazier bit of filmmaking than it lets on. What secret serviceman Dennis Quaid sees is connected to what man in the crowd Forest Whitaker sees. But where Quaid’s story leaves us, Whitaker’s begins. And after we follow Whitaker for a while, we’re linked to another character who adds more information at the tail end of Whitaker’s journey, and so on.

As an action picture, a movie in which Quaid chases down the assassins in the streets of Spain, Vantage Point is pretty damn successful. But the movie gets bogged down when it tries to outthink itself and the audience. The multi-prismatic device doesn’t help Vantage Point. If anything, it gets in the way of the much stronger action/espionage movie underneath.