It’s a gimmick, and it almost works. The new thriller “Vantage Point” covers the same half-hour of real time in about eight (I think) overlapping ways. Different characters offer different perspectives on the same event.
All right, interesting approach from screenwriter Barry Levin. It isn’t quite “Rashomon,” which was about the different stories that emerge from disparate, untrustworthy, testimonies. But you get the idea.
Of course, the level of interest is helped by the subject. If you told the story of your Uncle Ned pruning the apple tree from eight different perspectives, it wouldn’t click. Levin, sagely, has used the device for an assassination attempt on a U.S. president.
The prez (William Hurt) is speaking at an outdoor plaza in Salamanca, Spain (actually shot in Mexico), where world leaders have gathered for a conference on terrorism. Shots ring out; a bomb goes off.
This scene is just barely exciting enough to justify sitting through it a bunch of times, albeit from different angles. At first, we’re on the outside, seeing the action from the point-of-view of a veteran Secret Service agent (Dennis Quaid) back on the job after taking a bullet a year earlier.
We also see things through the eyes of a tourist (Forest Whitaker) with a camcorder, a local cop (Eduardo Noriega), people who might be mixed up in the terrorist plot (Said Taghmaoui, Ayelet Zurer), and some others. After you’ve seen the shooting and the explosion for a third time, you might begin to wonder where this is heading.
Then we see things from the perspective of the president himself, and the movie gets a little more exciting. A few slaps at current presidential attitudes neither add nor detract from the unfolding thriller.
It’s not really an actors’ movie, although Whitaker tries hard with a cornball character. Matthew Fox (from “Lost”) and Sigourney Weaver are also around.
Some of the interlocking narrative stuff works — call it the “Crash” approach to a suspense movie. But when director Pete Travis (who did the somewhat similar-in-tone Irish film “Omagh”) turns to the climax, it’s just a regular old car chase (but with smaller cars, because we’re in Europe), with the usual metal crashing and guns blazing.
There’s a lousy lesson here: Even though this script has launched former schoolteacher Levin into the front ranks of Hollywood screenwriters, it really boils down to a car chase.
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