Vantage Point: Movie Review (2008)

Directed by Pete Travis, written by Barry L. Levy, 90 minutes, rated PG-13.

Pete Travis’ new political thriller, "Vantage Point," is set in Salamanca, Spain, which is one of that country’s most beautiful, undiscovered cities.

Years ago, I spent several months in that city, and everything one would appreciate about it — from its awe-inspiring twin cathedrals to its central market area with its lively mix of restaurants and tapas bars to the formidable presence of its renowned university — is overlooked in a movie that doesn’t know what to do with any of it.

Turns out there’s good reason for that.

While Travis does nudge establishing shots of Salamanca into his movie, his film mostly was shot in Mexico. There, at a rundown mall located on the southern tip of Mexico City, he built a model of Salamanca’s massive Plaza Mayor, which happens to be one of Spain’s most stunning and architecturally important plazas. Though Travis is betting that Salamanca is so obscure a city that many won’t know the difference, what he fails to create in his awkward sleight-of-hand is a clear sense of place about a very specific place.

It’s strange. Since Salamanca hardly is considered a political hub, the only reason Travis had to set his film there was to capture the city’s charm and beauty. And yet he doesn’t capture it because he filmed his movie in another country located on another continent. The result is unusual, to say the least, an oddly generic-looking film about an unforgettable place rich in detail and history.

Based on Barry L. Levy’s script, "Vantage Point" is an intentionally fragmented movie that involves terrorists shooting the president of the United States (William Hurt) just as he’s about to deliver a speech on terrorism. The irony!

The film’s gimmick, reminiscent of the technique used in Kurosawa’s superior "Rashomon," is revealed in its trailer. Through the vantage points of several different characters, the audience presumably will piece together the mystery of who shot the president and why.

This tactic proves interesting for the first part of the movie, but as the film literally keeps rewinding through time in an effort to reveal new angles and fresh clues, it becomes tiresome and comical. Perhaps bored himself with the film’s structure, Travis doesn’t adhere strictly to its code; he does a sloppy job keeping us in each character’s moment, with multiple viewpoints sometimes shared at once.

Instead, after introducing Sigourney Weaver as a television news producer and then kicking her to the curb (we never see her again), he gives himself over to exploring the uninteresting lives of his other stock characters.

They include Secret Service agent Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid), who once took a bullet for the president and who now is seeking redemption from his colleagues, including Taylor (Matthew Fox); a man (Forest Whitaker) estranged from his family who is on vacation in Salamanca, where his video camera catches plenty of the action as it unfolds; a Spanish cop (Eduardo Noriega) coming to terms with his sketchy girlfriend; and the terrorists themselves, who possess their own little dramas, none of which, much like this disappointing movie, are as captivating as you’d like them to be.

Grade: C-

View the trailer here: