Review of Vantage Point (2008) by Diana W — 31 Mar 2013

This was an interesting idea and some of the scenes were suspenseful, but it derailed amid the mounting implausibilities. For the first two thirds of its running length, this thriller shows the same assassination attempt on the President of the United States from the differing perspectives of a variety of characters, including a Secret Service agent, a TV director, a tourist, and a local cop. With each new vantage point, we see a bit more of the sequence of events and come closer to figuring out whodunnit. In the final third however, the narrative moves forward in a more conventional fashion, cutting between bad guys and good guys and becoming just a typical chase film. I found the transition from the "vantage point" section to the traditional section jarring, but I'm not sure how it could have been handled to reduce the confusion.

The idea of different perspectives on the same event is not new. Kurosawa's "Rashomon" pioneered this storytelling technique. But in that case, each character had widely different understandings of what happened and the tension for the audience was in trying to understand what the "truth" really was. In Vantage Point, however, there is only one truth; it's just that each character is privy only to what he can see from where he is. It turns out the the "truth" in this case is a wildly complicated plot that makes huge assumptions about how other people will behave and is, frankly, unbelievable. The film is well-crafted and well-acted, and the location shooting (Mexico standing in for Spain) adds authenticity, but the script doesn't hold together well enough to raise this above any other thriller.