Spring Break
'Vantage Point': no point
Poor acting, weak characters and a horrid script made the film's audience laugh, and not in a good way
by Jordan Holtzman-Conston
Arts | 3/4/08
Posted online at 12:14 AM EST on 3/4/08
Columbia Pictures' Vantage Point covers every angle of an attempted presidential assassination except for the audience, and from their view, it's not a good scene. In fact, the audience's vantage point reveals little more than bad acting, forced plot twists and a 23-minute story rewound and played through six times. Columbia Pictures actually delayed the release one full year, which makes one wonder how much worse it could've been before an extra year of editing. Columbia should have held this one at least another year, as Vantage Point still needs more work before anyone should actually see it.
VP is made to be an entertaining hour-and-a -alf-long ride through the views of eight separate witnesses of an attempted presidential assassination in Salamanca, Spain. The core plot itself lasts little more than 23 minutes but the movie rewinds to noon six times in order to replay the same events through different (here it comes!) vantage points. VP's gimmick is to interlace each vantage point and connect what each character sees into the final solution of finding the shooter, who turns out to be part of a much larger conspiracy. It's reminiscent of Kurosawa's Rashomon, a Japanese crime story told through multiple points of view. However, VP's story is forced, and lacked the one clever plot twist it needed not to become predictably boring.
From the start, VP is too centered on overlapping each vantage point into one cohesive story. It pushes too many random plots in the same direction to the point where it doesn't develop different stories at all; it simply introduces them and then throws them into the mix. Every character conveniently appears at just the right time and place to meet one of the others, and the ending, in which they are all brought together, is simply terrible. Thomas Barnes, the Secret Service agent tracking the shooter, does not out-think or out-react the man he is chasing. He never figures out who he is, why he has done this or even how he managed to pull off such a stunt, and he would not even have caught the shooter if not for the virtue of true luck and the fact that the movie forced all eight vantage points together at the end.
VP is made to be an entertaining hour-and-a -alf-long ride through the views of eight separate witnesses of an attempted presidential assassination in Salamanca, Spain. The core plot itself lasts little more than 23 minutes but the movie rewinds to noon six times in order to replay the same events through different (here it comes!) vantage points. VP's gimmick is to interlace each vantage point and connect what each character sees into the final solution of finding the shooter, who turns out to be part of a much larger conspiracy. It's reminiscent of Kurosawa's Rashomon, a Japanese crime story told through multiple points of view. However, VP's story is forced, and lacked the one clever plot twist it needed not to become predictably boring.
From the start, VP is too centered on overlapping each vantage point into one cohesive story. It pushes too many random plots in the same direction to the point where it doesn't develop different stories at all; it simply introduces them and then throws them into the mix. Every character conveniently appears at just the right time and place to meet one of the others, and the ending, in which they are all brought together, is simply terrible. Thomas Barnes, the Secret Service agent tracking the shooter, does not out-think or out-react the man he is chasing. He never figures out who he is, why he has done this or even how he managed to pull off such a stunt, and he would not even have caught the shooter if not for the virtue of true luck and the fact that the movie forced all eight vantage points together at the end.
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