Eight Is More Than Enough
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Dennis Quaid is made of steel — and so are you.
These are two misguided assumptions at the center of “Vantage Point,” a conspiracy thriller with a hero so resistant to concussive impact and a piece-it-together narrative so frustrating that you just have to throw your hands up and laugh.
The action takes place during a half hour of what ends up being a very bad day in the war on terror. While speaking in a crowded outdoor square in Salamanca, Spain, American President Ashton (William Hurt) appears to be shot by a sniper. Amid the pandemonium, two bombs go off, sending a disparate group of bystanders — including a stunned news crew (led by Sigourney Weaver), a veteran Secret Service agent named Barnes (Mr. Quaid), a Spanish cop (Eduardo Noriega), and an unnaturally observant American tourist (Forest Whitaker) — scrambling for answers.
The story unfolds with a mad fury reminiscent of the TV show “24.” But instead of interweaving the individual experiences of each character more or less concurrently, Pete Travis’s film develops one point of view at a time. First comes the news team’s perspective of events; then, at a cliffhanger moment, the screen cuts to black — “23 Minutes Earlier” — and Agent Barnes’s story, which will fill in a few key details but leave many unattended, commences. And so on, eight times in all, with a car-chase finale tacked on at the end.
Screenwriter Barry Levy’s one-strand-at-a time approach to storytelling seems novel at first, but by the fourth or fifth reboot, it was eliciting groans at the preview screening I attended. And why shouldn’t it? Each segment adds minuscule gains to the story, then punts, and the proposition of starting all over again is not nearly as amusing here as it was in, say, “Groundhog Day.” Even at 90 minutes, “Vantage Point” is a test of patience.
Like “Rashomon,” Akira Kurosawa’s enormously influential conflicting-stories drama from 1950, “Groundhog Day” suggested that the best way to deal with a repetitive structure is to mess with it. But Mr. Travis’s film forges ahead — then back, then ahead — with grim determination, each new version dutifully building on the last one. Although certain assumptions are shown to be wrong with each retelling, “Vantage Point” isn’t much more challenging than your average thriller. It shouldn’t be confused with “Babel” or “Syriana,” hopscotch narratives designed like advanced equations. In fact, revisiting the main plot points like flashcards, as “Vantage Point” does, enables viewers to step out for popcorn and come back without missing much.
Proceeding at a breakneck pace, the film blows numerous opportunities to slow down and build suspense — Mr. Travis’s mishandling of not one but at least a half-dozen pre-explosion sequences surely has Alfred Hitchcock rolling in his grave — and the unorthodox storytelling masks what is, ultimately, a somewhat unimpressive yarn. None of the plot twists are all that surprising (the best one is divulged in the film’s trailer) and a cute little girl with an ice cream cone ends up playing a disconcertingly large role in the whole affair.
Even by action-movie standards of character development, the emphasis on plot prevents anyone in the ensemble from becoming too interesting. (Oddly, Ms. Weaver’s news team disappears altogether.) Although intermittently entertaining, “Vantage Point” is no more clever or imaginative than the American security experts the film makes a point of placing one step behind the terrorists — that is, until Agent Barnes takes the wheel. Watching this American hero emerge unscathed from multiple collisions while chasing down ethnically ambiguous bad guys who speak fluent English, you realize that beneath its fancy fractured narrative, “Vantage Point” is old-fashioned in all the wrong ways.