Vantage Point

Review by Zachary K. Parker

            Pete Travis’ political thriller, “Vantage Point,” boasts a story with “8 Strangers, 8 Points of View. 1 Truth,” but instead the film presents five points of view with several strangers a few muddled truths.

            In the first story, Dennis Quaid plays Thomas Barnes, a Secret Service agent, who has returned to protecting the president after taking a bullet for him in the past. The president is a attending a summit in Spain concerning the war on terror. As the trailers show, he’s shot and the summit is disrupted when the stage blows up.

            Barnes addresses past character issues, the president’s backstory provides a few anecdote on his dilemmas as a president concerning taking a response to the summit’s terrorist attack, and Forest Whitaker also gets a section as the self-sacrificial American good guy, Howard Lewis (there’s also a Spanish police officer but his story is so superfluous he’s easily forgotten).

            The problem with the stories, especially as we find out in the story behind the terrorist’s actions, resides in the lack of back-story provided for the terrorists in comparison to Barnes, the president, and Lewis. The terrorists become excuses for a story, instead of human people inhabiting it.

Unlike a political thriller like “Syriana” or even the “Bourne” trilogy, director Pete Travis lets the banality of screenwriter Barry Levy’s stereotypical terrorist characters shoot people and die. The fact that these terrorists are human is almost entirely forgotten except for a momentary flash of human grace near the end as they are driving the ambulance.

You would think that Matthew Fox (“Lost’s” Jack Shephard) would get more treatment as Secret Service Agent, Kent Taylor, considering the fact that his character seems to be the most interesting character in the film.

Other big names like Sigourney Weaver and Bruce McGill have fleeting appearances, which provide material for other characters to work with but, like the film itself, they slip into mediocrity.

            Each story ends on a cliffhanger, but it almost seems like the creators may have run out of creative ideas after five perspectives as they suddenly smash all the stories together. It all makes sense, but it just feels like there could be much more to help us relate to the characters, instead of just jacking up the suspense to get us to chomp down on the popcorn quicker.

In this way, the different perspectives in the beginning half of the film are reduced to a gimmick, which add nothing to the film except to hide the fact that without the different perspectives, “Vantage Point” is only a gimmicky action flick with car chases and easily killable terrorists.

While the value of life is somewhat affirmed in the end, this is a Christ-less and forgettable excursion into shameless American worship and explosions.

“Vantage Point” does not offer any enlightening points of view, and I personally wouldn’t even take advantage of DVD rental prices to see it.