Vantage Point

So I went with a colleague last night and saw Vantage Point -- the latest 'smart terrorists who can orchestrate the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in order to kidnap the President, but in the long run are ultimately stopped by the simplest of mistakes that any nimrod would know not to make' movie from Sony. Okay, my description isn't very good. The tagline for the movie will probably help out.

"Eight strangers. Eight points of view. One truth."

.. yeah, clever tagline delivered from Pete Travis, but the sad truth is that it's not really clever at all. In fact, if you just read the tagline, you really don't even have to go see the movie to get what it's about. As it implies, the film follows eight different people, has two mysterious explosions, and a couple of gunshots that hit the president (or IS IT?!!?!?!!?!?!?) and a surprisingly good car chase through the streets of Spain. The only smarts I see in making this film is the initially annoying rewind they do five times throughout the film to the very beginning; which is always, always, always at 12:00PM. You'll get used to that stupid church bell ringing by the end of the movie, trust us.

Every time the film rewinds, you're given the different 'vantage point' from all the people of the movie. Sometimes it's just one person, and sometimes it's a couple of people with the same agenda. It's an interesting idea (although not new) and the director does a pretty good job of clouding up what all the different people are doing and their motives... if it wasn't for the trailer, I might have been surprised. After watching the trailer once, I could guess who the terrorists were, that the president had a double, and that the little dude with the cellphone was behind his kidnapping.

In short, there's a few twists that make you say, "OHHHH!" and "So that's why the giant ant colony was kept a secret for so long!", but unless you're one of those twist junkies, I wouldn't recommend it until it hits the $2 theater.

Well, I guess I wrote more of a spoiler than a review. But don't feel bad or be mad at me: there's really nothing else to the movie... except the half decent car chase, a la Dennis Quaid and his chin.


Only you can do it, Dennis.