I Watched This On Purpose: Vantage Point

By Josh Modell | September 10, 2008 | 6:50pm

Film Features Film

I Watched This On Purpose: Vantage Point

Sometimes, even The A.V. Club isn't impervious to the
sexy allure of ostensible cultural garbage. Which is why there's I Watched This
On Purpose, our feature exploring the impulse to spend time with trashy-looking
yet in some way irresistible entertainments, playing the long odds in hopes of
a real reward. And a good time.

Cultural infamy: Vantage Point, released earlier this
year, has virtually no cultural cache. It appears to be the kind of empty
thriller that's looking to make a quick buck without making too many
waves—the trailers were exciting enough that the movie opened at number
one, but it quickly disappeared from theaters. It's got a 35 percent rating on
Rotten Tomatoes, which for our purposes is probably worse than, say, a 5 or a
10. It means the movie is just okay, not shockingly bad or surprisingly good.
Metacritic has it at a similar 40/100, and our own Scott Tobias called it
"craven, shallow… and gimmicky" on the way to giving it a C-. (And that isn't
me rearranging his words, film-studio-style, to make it sound better.)

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Curiosity factor: But still, my brain yearns
for political thrillers, especially about assassinations. Even a bad
assassination movie (the Bruce Willis remake of Day Of The Jackal, for example) pretty much
always has enough exciting moments to make it worth watching. (Wasn't that Jack
Black in Jackal
selling Willis the gigantic machine gun?) I'm rarely tempted to watch even the
most accessible, supposedly good rom-com (never seen Jerry Maguire, and I really like
Cameron Crowe), but I will watch the most half-assed political thriller or
decent-looking cop movie. (Look for 88 Minutes in an upcoming I Watched
This On Purpose.) Also, the cast in Vantage Point looked pretty decent.
Forest Whitaker, that hunky Matthew Fox from Lost, Dennis Quaid, Sigourney
Weaver, William Hurt… And then there's the movie's "twist"—right there in
the title—that we're going to see this assassination from various points
of view. (Like Rashomon, only with greater box-office potential.) Oh, and I can't end
this paragraph without mentioning Nick Of Time, the 1995 Johnny
Depp/Christopher Walken flick that takes place in "real time." It's movies like
that—shallow and gimmicky in all the right ways—that make me think Vantage
Point has
a chance.

The viewing experience: Color me pleasantly
surprised. Vantage Point has little of the ridiculousness you might expect from a
Hollywood thriller—it's super-lean, full of nonstop action, and actually
twisty enough (without too many ridiculous coincidences) that it kept me
guessing, or at least interested.

So, to the vantage points. We first see the events
unfold from the trailer of a mobile newsroom. At the helm is GNN (it's like
CNN, get it?) producer Sigourney Weaver, whose presence is barely a blip in the
film after the first few minutes. She and her crew are filming an appearance by
President William Hurt, who's in Spain to promote a new multi-country alliance
that promises to put a "stranglehold" on terror. (That's the way to stop
terror, strangle it!) Her various angles, courtesy of a bunch of cameras in the
plaza, provide an overview of what's about to happen. And what is that, you
ask? The President Of The United States (hereafter referred to as POTUS, both
by me and by the rest of the cast) is about to be shot.

Weaver also lets us know that Secret Service agent
Dennis Quaid was shot only a year ago while saving the president from
assassination. And now Quaid is kind of cracked up, taking pills and generally
being nervous. His partner is Matthew Fox, who (mild spoiler, but not really)
clearly has something up his sleeve. Our next vantage point is theirs, as they
prepare the president for his trip to the plaza. Oh, and each time we change
vantage points, there's a little cliffhanger, and the film rewinds quickly.
It's actually pretty effective, in a 24 kind of way. (You could say that about this
whole movie—it's very 24.) So the president is shot. It looks bad. We know
that much. Quaid and Fox have this stupid exchange: "This never should have
happened." "Except that it did, on our watch."

Things quickly get sorta complicated—again,
in a 24
way, not in a what-the-fuck-is-going-on way—as the vantage point skips to
a Spanish cop who's there to protect the mayor. Or so we think. He quickly
touches base with two mysterious Spaniards, but we don't
know—yet—what they're up to.

Did I forget to mention the explosion? It's kinda
key… Not only is the president shot, but the podium on which he was shot
explodes about five minutes later. It's actually a terrific device to keep the
action moving and keep things tense. And I found myself literally on the edge
of my seat, biting my nails a bit—a good sign for this type of movie.

Forest Whitaker eventually shows up as a tourist
who happens to be at every important event in the film with his video
camera—he's like Forrest Gump meets Abraham Zapruder. He gets in some
unnecessary backstory (he's in Europe alone, estranged from his family) before
his camera becomes important (sort of) to figuring out this convoluted mess.
Whitaker is typically wide-eyed and weird here, and a bit of a scenery-chewer.
But like everybody else, he isn't the star. There really is no star, with the
possible exception of Quaid, who gets a little more screen time.

Okay, here comes a spoiler-filled twist that might
make you think you'll hate this movie. It turns out that the president who was
shot was actually a double. (They gloss this ridiculousness over by saying,
"Reagan used doubles all the time.") The terrorists know this, too, and the
chief terrorist even scoffs at America for using the double: "That's the beauty
of American arrogance. They always think they're one step ahead of everybody
else." The double only makes the plot twistier, though, as we learn about the
terrorist plan to kidnap the president at his hotel—which involves
another explosion or two.

Before the prez is kidnapped, we learn that he's a
pretty righteous dude. Even though his aide is telling him to call in a
retaliatory airstrike (to a non-assassination that just happened two minutes
ago?), he keeps chill and plans to stay in the country for the summit. That's
actually a huge strength for Vantage Point—it bothers very little with
character development and not at all with B-stories. Each person has just
enough screen time to put forward the strength of their character, and that's
all viewers need to know.

That goes double for the terrorists. There's no
explanation of why they're doing what they're doing, and there's no nefarious
mastermind tapping the tips of his fingers together, Mr. Burns style. They're
focused on doing their job, and that job includes using a cell phone as a
remote-control targeting device for a kick-ass machine gun. And shooting the
president who isn't actually the president. But still, kick-ass remote-control
machine gun. (Which actually seems vaguely plausible, doesn't it?)

Where does this all lead? Not to some court case
or drawn-out explanation of everybody's motivations or even to a twisty double
cross. It leads to a simple car chase, well-shot (and quite Bourne-ish), long, loud, and
where we know exactly who the good guy and who the bad guy is. It's refreshing,
in its way.

How much of the experience wasn't a total waste
of time?
One of Vantage Point's greatest strengths is that it wastes almost no time at all,
and it does so on purpose (much the way I watched it). At a lean 85 minutes,
there's very little time to get bored or pick apart giant leaps of logic and
coincidence. If I were an extreme editor, I might've shaved off an entire
character, but then we might not even be at feature length. As it stands, I'd
say a solid 80 minutes wasn't a waste of my time, giving Vantage Point a solid 94 percent. In
real-world terms, that's an A!