FOR a long time, “Vantage Point” reminded me of the old joke about the Italian tank: four gears in reverse, one in for ward.
Once it gets going (about halfway through), this presidential-assassination whodunit throws in enough hurtling bodies, screaming bullets and totaled cars that it at least holds your interest, so it passes the worth-watching-if-you’re-stuck-on-an-airplane test.
Down here at sea level, though, it’s unlikely to be your best option (unless the rest of the screens at the multiplex are showing “Fool’s Gold” and “Jumper”).
William Hurt plays the president; he’s in Spain to deliver a speech and also take a couple of bullets from an assassin hidden somewhere in the unruly crowd. Then a bomb goes off. The how and why of these five minutes of chaos are the subject of the entire first half of the movie.
The event is shown and reshown and re-reshown from the point of view of various characters, from a Secret Service man (Dennis Quaid), who is still twitching from the bullet he once took for POTUS, to a TV news director (Sigourney Weaver) monitoring the speech in a van, to a tourist (Forest Whitaker) recording the speech on his video camera.
With each retelling, the story advances a bit farther. It hits a supposed cliffhanger (every so often someone peers into a video monitor showing images of the shooting, exclaiming, “Oh my God!” as we wonder what he just saw) and rewinds to the beginning to start over from a different angle.
The film is tremendously pleased with its structure, but it has no answer to the charge that a big chunk of it is reruns of earlier scenes. The blur of personnel – a dozen or so shuffle in and out of the action – is meant to keep you guessing, and to a point it does: Is the guy in the beard, for instance, a good guy, a terrorist or a red herring?
But too much attention is given to some people and far too little to others. We learn that Whitaker’s tourist is having problems with his marriage; under the circumstances, this is like being told that the man with the umbrella on the Grassy Knoll in Dallas suffered from athlete’s foot. The key person behind the conspiracy isn’t given a motive or a back story, so the revelation of his or her role in it doesn’t have any impact.
Chugging forward and chundering back, the movie keeps promising to whip up something hellishly complicated, but what keeps the movie going for an hour and a half is not a complicated plot but a stingy way of dribbling out information.
The conspiracy, which turns out to span three continents and involve more players than the USC marching band, leads nowhere interesting. Moreover, the central twist that constitutes the sole memorable detail of the whole scramble is both absurdly far-fetched and ultimately irrelevant since it doesn’t surprise the people it’s meant to. And one key character simply disappears, seemingly forgotten by everyone including the screenwriter.
The ending doesn’t pay off – unless this is some sort of meta-production that intentionally leaves more unanswered questions than the Warren Commission report. Maybe it’s meant to set up a sequel in which eight different producers, screenwriters and studio execs hash out the mysterious box-office death of this movie – and the motive of the critics who assassinated it.
VANTAGE POINT
Low caliber.
Running time: 90 minutes. Rated PG-13 (violence, action, profanity). At the Lincoln Square, the Kips Bay, the Orpheum, others.