Rating: 1/2 * out of 5
Directed by Pete Travis.
Starring Dennis Quaid, Forest Whitaker, Matthew Fox, William Hurt and Sigourney Weaver.
On paper, it sounds like an interesting idea. Eight strangers view an assassination attempt on the president of the United States during an anti-terrorism summit in Spain, and it is only from a combination of their various vantage points on the events of that day that the truth, the gestalt, emerges.
Not only that, but the formula is a tried and true one. In Rashomon, four witnesses’ wildly divergent accounts of a rape and murder thwart discernment. Tarantino used a similar device in Jackie Brown, showing the same scene repeatedly from new angles, expanding the context of already-familiar events. But by the third time the clock in Vantage Point resets to 11:59am, the audience is groaning and laughing derisively by turns, and the closest point of reference seems to be Bill Murray’s 1993 comedy Groundhog Day.
Director Pete Travis is a newcomer, with only a few obscure TV show episodes to his credit, and it shows. He marshals every musty, mawkish device possible for the poorly executed characterization of his cast, from slow-motion black and white flash-cuts to the repetition of recent snippets of conversation in voiceover. (Do we really need to hear that again to understand that it’s what the character is thinking about?) He elicits notably bad performances from his actors, with the exception of Forest Whitaker, still fresh from his Best Actor win for The Last King of Scotland last year. (The fact that Whitaker deigned to appear at all in a film such as this can be compared only to Halle Berry’s role as Catwoman after winning her own Oscar for Monster’s Ball.)
Dennis Quaid in particular is at his most wooden, and viewers may be surprised to find themselves actually wishing for a performance of the calibre Hayden Christensen delivered as Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequels. Even the inimitable Sigourney Weaver is wasted in a walk-on role which essentially disappears after the first five minutes. By and large, the characters are propelled by the kind of weak, maudlin motivations (“I’m only doing this because my brother is being held hostage”) we have come to expect from sloppily-written TV series such as 24 and Prison Break.
As if that’s not enough, the assassination/kidnapping plot which is supposedly the centrepiece of the film is given only the thinnest undercurrent of a motivation and executed so poorly on-screen as to seem like a Jack Bauer escapade that got left on the cutting room floor. Not only that, but the film’s emotional climax, its adrenaline peak, consists of a sobbing little girl walking into the path of an ambulance. Somehow, by some immense constellation of coincidences, everyone from the American President to the terrorist leader and Forest Whitaker’s homesick father has an investment in how that particular emergency vehicle responds to the fact that there is a child on the road ahead of it. And then the movie ends.
Never mind that this wildly ridiculous climax comes on the heels of the world’s first boring car chase, a seemingly endless affair shot with overly shaky cameras reminiscent of the Bourne trilogy’s annoying fight scenes, or that the film which seemed so heavily invested in its own conception of multiple, disparate vantage points gives up on the idea altogether in its third act, when it first splits one “viewpoint” into two, and then totally abandons the viewpoint restrictions of its own structure to proceed as a standard action film cross-cutting between multiple plot strands.
Pete Travis, it would appear, is well on his way to surpassing the likes of Joel Schumacher or Michael Bay in the creation of worthless and forgettable films, and landing himself in the echelon of Uwe Boll (king of awful video-game adaptations from BloodRayne to Alone in the Dark). Vantage Point, for losing itself in its concept only to lose its grasp on that concept altogether, gets even half a star simply because it is possible to imagine a movie so much worse. After all, it could have been directed by Boll.