Gimmick – noun - an ingenious or novel device, scheme, or stratagem, esp. one designed to attract attention or increase appeal. (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/gimmick).

Rashomon – A film by Akira Kurosawa showing a crime from four contradictory points of view.

Vantage Point, the new thriller headlined by Dennis Quaid, attempts to tell the tale of the apparent shooting of the President of the United States while on a state visit to Salamanca, Spain to give a speech highlighting a new potential counter-terrorism agreement. The gimmick employed here by director Pete Travis is to segment the narrative into eight fragments, each dedicated to showing a different point of view of the event. While modern audiences might find this as a novel approach to film making, others more versed in cinema will undoubtedly be reminded of Akira Kurosawa’s seminal movie, Rashomon. Let’s get one thing out of the way immediately – Vantage Point is no Rashomon. Not even close.

The movie then is mostly told in a series of 10-15 minute flashbacks, all of the same event but from different perspectives. Director Pete Travis makes it easily discernable when these segments transition as the film literally rewinds and the clock is reset to a few seconds before noon.

The movie actually opens with its best foot forward showcasing the inhabitants of the GNN news network trailer as TV director Rex Brooks (the ever reliable Signourney Weaver) organizes her camera and productions crews stationed at this political event. There’s a real buzz here that shows the audience what really occurs behind the scenes at major news stations like CNN and Fox News and conjures up past genre films like Broadcast News and Network. The controlled chaos of the news trailer is nicely juxtaposed with the resulting assassination attempt that occurs and though the crew is initially shocked at what has happened their instincts kick in as they continue to broadcast.

This and the following segment headlined by secret service agents Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid) and Kent Taylor (Matthew Fox) as they guard the President enroute to the event anchor the film and provide most of the clues that we require to figure out what is going on.

That is, or so we thought.

The biggest stumbling point here is that each successive segment adds new information not available in previous flashbacks. At first, this doesn’t seem to be much of a problem as the narrative remains tight and focused on the actual event of the President’s shooting but it soon becomes clear in later slices that the story is beginning to become unhinged with too many plot twists and coincidences that aren’t even hinted upon in the opening flashbacks. Instead of centering on the shooting we’re suddenly thrust into a different environment and another set of plot machinations that are taking place concurrently with the shooting of the President.

This complication feels entirely too manufactured as an obvious attempt to throw the audience an obligatory twist. Worst still, certain characters disappear entirely like Sigourney Weaver and the whole news crew, while new ones appear with no hint of motivation except the thinnest of references. This disjointed narrative does nothing to build empathy for any of the characters save secret agent Barnes (Quaid) but that comes more from his extended amount of screen time as the lead character. Early on it is established that Barnes had previously taken a bullet for the current President but instead of being praised by his peers he’s unceremoniously ridiculed by colleagues waiting for him to emotionally fall apart. Strange. You’d think the secret agent community would label him a hero and try to help him at every turn.

The fault does not lie with the talented cast although Forest Whittaker’s character, Howard Lewis, elicited more than a few chuckles not because he is given comedic dialogue but because the film makers turn a normal American sightseer into an angelic humanitarian who in the breadth of the film manages to aid Barnes, save a little girl and outrun and outsmart both the secret service and the terrorists. No offense to Mr. Whittaker but surely he can’t be in better physical shape than those tasked to protect the President’s life.

As the movie hurtles towards the finish line it descends into potboiler action territory featuring an extended car chase through the city streets replete with shaky cam, fast cuts and almost superhuman dexterity from all involved. Sticking with the superhero motif, agent Barnes must be damn well superhuman as he survives every action cliché thrown at him including a bomb blast, gunfire and one particularly nasty side impact crash that crumples his car like a piñata.

Then there are the truly odd moments in the narrative that hinge completely on the element of chance that portrays a lack of inherent logic. Once the diabolical plot is revealed in full it just cannot hold water especially as it attempts to shoehorn eight disparate viewpoints into a final segment where everyone converges onto a single focal point for no apparent reason except to satisfy the screenwriter. Worst still, the climax depends on a totally inappropriate conceit of the screenwriter to suddenly reverse a villain’s innate character 180 degrees in order to save a child wandering on a freeway. We’re talking about a character who has planned this meticulous operation and shows no sign of remorse in killing anyone who even looks at him in the wrong way suddenly feeling the urge to save an innocent bystander.

Production values are certainly high and the film makes use of the local scenery to good effect but the gimmick wears itself out long before the climax. When the secondary narrative kicks in it negates what happens in the first two thirds of the movie which is especially grating to the audience who had to sit through almost an hour of repeating viewpoints on the same event only to realize it was all a ruse.

Rashomon only had four differing points of view but they all centered on the same event giving the narrative gimmick employed by Kurosawa weight as you could be drawn into the unfolding mystery. Vantage Point has twice as many viewpoints but quantity doesn’t translate into more than frustration especially once you realize that all the segments are not equal as they relate to the central narrative thrust. Kurosawa deftly handled his four segments by purposely showing them from contradictory points of view, all of which have been coloured by the character’s telling them thus changing how the major events were perceived. Vantage Point does not. All the perspectives show the events exactly occurring the same way.

It is widely known that although Police and law enforcement agencies rely on first hand accounts that there are many inconsistencies in peoples’ testimony even if they all saw the same event. It’s just human nature to see things and remember them differently. Here in Vantage Point, when you see a bomb in a bag being thrown under the platform by the same person four times it gets increasingly redundant as nothing substantial is changing. Now, if each person saw it differently then it might make for a good mystery to unravel and be truer to reality but here it’s doing nothing by padding the running time as each segment takes on the feel of déjà vu, constantly repeating the bulk of information we already have been shown.

Vantage Point – A film that attempts to highlight the assassination attempt on the President of the Unites States utilizing eight separate characters and their viewpoints but whose only achievement is a cacophony of loud noises punctuated with MTV stylized action and a gimmick that feels pasted on in order to expand an implausible TV length plot into a feature film.

*1/2 out of ****

2008, USA, 90 minutes, PG-13, Columbia Pictures
Directed by Pete Travis
Screenplay by Barry Levy
Produced by Neal H. Moritz
Executive Producer: Callum Greene, Tania Landau, Lynwood Spinks
Original Music by Atli Örvarsson
Cinematography by Amir M. Mokri
Film Editing: Stuart Baird, Sigvaldi J. Kárason

Thomas Barnes: Dennis Quaid
Kent Taylor: Matthew Fox
Howard Lewis: Forest Whitaker
Phil McCullough: Bruce McGill
Javier: Édgar Ramírez
Suarez: Saïd Taghmaoui
Veronica: Ayelet Zurer
Angie Jones: Zoë Saldana
Rex Brooks: Sigourney Weaver
President Ashton: William Hurt
Ted Heinkin: James LeGros
Enrique: Eduardo Noriega

© 2009 The Galactic Pillow