Living & Arts

'Vantage' without a point

In print | February 28, 2008

This is a film about the digital age. This is a film about Current Events. This is a film about humanity. But mostly, this is a film about the same things blowing up, the same cars crashing and the same people frantically running around over and over again.

“Vantage Point” wants to be a Relevant Political Drama, but where it really succeeds is as an average-to-good action thriller. It recounts the events surrounding the shooting of the American President at the inauguration of a counter-terror summit in Salamanca. The trick is that the film only covers about 15 to 20 minutes of time — the plot gets going, then it stops, rewinds and repeats from the point of view of a different character, until everything comes together in a glorious orgy of confusion, panic and things blowing up.

The film’s construction can be frustrating, especially as it becomes clear that there are certain characters whose perspectives are, frankly, irrelevant. Forest Whitaker as an American tourist glued to his camcorder turns out to be almost entirely superfluous, although he does the kind of job of making concerned, frightened and panicked faces that only an Oscar-winner can do. Mostly he’s there so that Dennis Quaid’s Secret Service agent can look at his footage and shout, “Oh my God!” and then dash off maddeningly.

If “Vantage Point” has more than its fair share of maddening dashing, it is the rare suspense/mystery/action extravaganza that actually earns them with its ending. Sure, after the second or third rewinding, a collective sigh went through the theater, and it seemed for a time that the proletariat might revolt. But then there was a lot of running, a lot of car chasing, and a lot of pieces falling into place. Unlike most thrillers with ludicrously complicated plots, it is possible to follow “Vantage Point,” and it is possible to guess some (but not all) of the twists; an immensely satisfactory combination.

Director Pete Travis falls into a few familiar pitfalls — he’s a little too impressed with the “rewind” function on the editing machine — but he and screenwriter Barry Levy are instrumental in keeping this film afloat. Despite the brief interludes of useless characters, Levy generally knows whom to follow, and Travis uses the camera to pick out characters who, even for a brief instance, give a little more of the mystery away. Given that no one person has more than 30 minutes of screen-time, the fact that Travis and Levy help you to care for the fate of some is impressive. The skilled construction of “Vantage Point” takes the edge off of the repetitiveness — you may be surprised to find yourself fairly engrossed in action that you’ve seen replay four times.

The problem is that while the puzzle fits together fairly nicely on paper, once you pick it up, everything falls off. In typical genre form, there’s the Secret Service agent with clear mental issues put back on duty, the featuring of some unlikely technological advances, including the apparently adamantium-reinforced, indestructible consumer car that survives about five consecutive crashes and keeps on plugging and the evil mastermind whose extremely ingenious plot depends utterly on certain individuals out of his control behaving in very specific, unpredictable ways.

“Vantage Point” also has minor pretensions to greatness that would really be better left on the cutting room floor. Most of the ten minutes that we spend with President Ashton showcase him sermonizing about the proper way to fight the War on Terror, which doesn’t include bombing terrorist camps in western-friendly Morocco, as his advisors recommend. “We have the world’s sympathy right now,” emotes the President. “We have to honor that.” This pointed criticism of George W. Bush’s post-9/11 policies would indeed be very pointy, if only “Vantage Point” wasn’t a movie about Arab terrorists and their Plot Against America. Suicide bombers, hostage situations, Middle-Eastern villains — not exactly the kind of radical new look at geopolitics that might give a film the moral high ground.

Finally, the film is inconsistent within its own world. The gimmick holds that the audience must only see events from the limited point of view of successive individuals. But Travis can’t stop himself from repeatedly cutting away from the perspective at hand to the same series of boring, omniscient shots — you see the crowd in Salamanca from the same shot and square blow up from the same shot over and over and over again. Some might say that this is the auteur cleverly calling attention to the film’s own subjective vantage point. I say, this is the kind of film that thinks that “auteur” is a new kind of coffee at Starbucks; it’s sloppy direction.

Still, most of these critiques could be made of nearly any stock action film, and “Vantage Point” is less extreme in its problems and more substantive in its plotting than most. Sure, the cell phone that transforms from a sniper’s telescopic sight into a detonator may be a little ridiculous, but it doesn’t nearly approach the level of ridonkadonk of Will Smith’s alien-technology-compatible “Uploading Virus” computer in “Independence Day.” If the biggest problem of “Vantage Point” is that it thinks it’s more interesting than it is, its biggest plus is that it’s more interesting than it has any right to be.