Vantage Point

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

I was getting a strong DePalma-esque vibe from the trailers of this one, so I had been curious to see it. Something about the visual style, I guess, plus the use of shifting perspectives and one character seeming to have a double. I thought it looked a bit like if DePalma did a Tom Clancy movie.

No dice. If anything, the visual style recalls a more colorful version of Paul Greengrass's style in the Bourne movies. A little less shaky, but similar.

This was not a very good movie. The gimmick is that the movie keeps rewinding every 10 minutes or so to show you the events from a different character's perspective. I keep hearing it compared to Rashomon, but that's not correct. In Rashomon, everybody told completely different stories, here we just see the exact same story from different perspectives.

As a result of this gimmick, the movie doesn't really even build a proper pace or narrative tempo until the last 20 minutes or so, because the action keeps getting interrupted. And a lot of moments and information are repeated, making a lot of the movie boring and redundant. I mean, we see the president (actually, his double) shot about 5 times, and each time it's played as a shock... it kind of gets old after a while.

It's only near the end when all the plots converge that the movie holds any interest... one way or another, this wouldn't have been a great thriller, but I think it could have been a better one if they just cut back and forth between all the stories instead of showing them one at a time. There would have been more rhythm and tension.

The best part of this movie is Forrest Whittaker, not so much because he's good in this movie but because in his maybe 10-15 minutes of screen time they attempt to make him a fleshed-out, full blown dramatic character with an arc and everything. This leads to an amusingly awkward moment at the end for him, when he (bless his heart) gives it his all in terribly written dramatic/emotional climax. It's fun to see a great actor try so earnestly with bad material. I love you, Ghost Dog. Also, there is an entertainingly overstated scene where he tries to save a little girl from an oncoming car.

I wish there had been more ridiculous moments like that. There are some ridiculous plot developments, but they are not ridiculous enough to be fun, and exactly ridiculous enough to be stupid. If someone had (like I had wished) just pushed this a little harder into over-the-top DePalma territory, this could have been more entertaining. Or even if it sucked, it could have been an interesting failure like Raising Cain. As it is, it's a very mediocre action thriller with maybe a handful of good moments.