Review

Review Date: 24-February-08
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Juicy

Vantage Point (2008)

Contrary to what the title and marketing suggest, "Vantage Point" is not a movie that invites you to consider how different people experience the same event in different ways. The script unfolds more like pieces of a puzzle being fitted together, integrated but initially distinct. At its center is a plot to sabotage an international anti-terrorist summit by bombing the host city and kidnapping or assassinating the U.S. President. Swirling around this center are Secret Service men, terrorists, news reporters, and innocents who become embroiled through folly or bad luck.

Thanks to a few twists and the uniform strength of its cast, "Vantage Point" overcomes a fragmented structure which flirts with redundancy and threatens to bog it down. Dennis Quaid subdues his charisma to play a dedicated Secret Service agent who took a bullet for the President (William Hurt) a year ago and needs the high-profile summit in Salamanca, Spain, to make a comeback. (The gorgeous locale is another of the movie's assets.) His jitters worry himself and his colleagues, especially his partner (Matthew Fox). Poor guy: he leaps out of the frying pan and into the fire when shots ring out almost as soon as the President takes the stage, followed by two explosions which rock the packed piazza.

What set the chaos in motion is gradually revealed to involve a female conspirator (Ayelet Zurer), her betrayed lover (the highly intriguing Eduardo Noriega), a couple of minions, and the villain pulling the strings (Saïd Taghmaoui). These people are pleasantly vague as befits a political thriller aimed at the gut and not the mind. They are post-9/11 cookie-cutter baddies for the visual age, fashion models who look cruel and high-tech enough to be dangerous without representing anything in particular. I guess we have worked through our fear of terrorists and can now relegate them to the Hollywood storehouse of exotic scoundrels inhabited at times by Saracens, pirates, and Nazis.

A trimmed-down Forest Whitaker rounds out the tale (hmm, is that an oxymoron?) as a simple American tourist who captures the goings-on with his video camera. He crosses paths with some of the others and even participates in one of two chase scenes out of nosiness, patriotism, and the desire to help a young Spanish girl he met by chance. This girl adds a somewhat hokey touch to the proceedings, but I did enjoy how she comes to symbolize a basic decency to which no one is immune. This is a movie, after all, where the good guys carry the day and protect the world from an unsettling vision of anarchy. Whether that reflects truth or virtue in reality I cannot say, but for two hours in a theater it is a welcome point of view.

Copyright © 2008 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.