Vantage Point

Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid) and Kent Taylor (Matthew Fox) are Secret Service agents assigned to protect President Ashton (William Hurt) at a landmark summit on the global war on terror. When President Ashton is shot moments after his arrival in Spain, chaos ensues and disparate lives collide in the hunt for the assassin. In the crowd is Howard Lewis (Forest Whitaker), an American tourist who thinks he's captured the shooter on his camcorder while videotaping the event for his kids back home. There is also an American TV news producer Rex Brooks (Sigourney Weaver), relaying the historic event to millions of TV viewers across the globe. We follow each person's perspective of the same moments before and immediately after the shooting, as more pieces of the puzzle are revealed, to get to the terrifying truth behind the assassination attempt.

Director Pete Travis is relatively new to the big screen, having directed several made-for-TV films as well as mini-series, winning a few awards including a BAFTA TV Award for his drama "Omagh" (2004). His background in drama translates well to the big screen, as "Vantage Point" is a gripping, heart-stopping thriller that will have you on the edge of your seat practically from start to finish. The film doesn't stop for a breather once the action starts, and it is intense all the way through.

Dennis Quaid did a wonderful job as a fiercely loyal and paranoid bodyguard to the President. In fact, it was he who basically carried the movie all the way to the end. William Hurt's portrayal of President Ashton was pretty colourless and devoid of any real charisma, but this could be due to the fact that his character wasn't given much room to develop more. Matthew Fox's performance was predictably mediocre, as he seems to be quite a homogeneous actor, especially in this movie. Forest Whitaker as usual never disappoints and his extremely likable, bumbling character brought a certain sweetness to the movie that would have otherwise been non-existent.

The narrative style seems similar to that of films like "Run Lola Run", where the whole duration of the movie is based on only 20 or 30 minutes of a particular day or event, which is retold in different ways again and again. The difference, however, is that in "Vantage Point", even though each 'session' is seen through the eyes of a different character (eight to be exact), it is the same story over and over again, only with new viewpoints and new pieces of the puzzle being revealed. After the third or fourth round, it gets rather annoying and tedious. This isn't to say that each perspective doesn't bring something new to the whole mystery - indeed, it was intriguing to try and figure out what new twist would come up and blur the lines between good and evil.

The cinematography was reminiscent of that of "Cloverfield" and "The Blair Witch Project", where the camera bounces all around, which is fine for certain action scenes, but was used too much in this movie, and was enough to give me a headache. Luckily, it slowed down towards the end and I didn't need a barf bag.In summary, "Vantage Point" is quite an average film and, despite a few twists and turns in the plot, is basically predictable.