| Field | Details |
|---|---|
| Movie Name | VANTAGE POINT (2008) |
| Director | Pete Travis |
| Writer | Barry L. Levy |
| Lead Actor | Dennis Quaid |
| Cast | Dennis Quaid, Forest Whitaker, Matthew Fox |
| Genre | Action, Drama, Thriller |
| Release Date | February 22, 2008 (United States) |
| Duration | 1h 30m (90 min) |
| Budget | $40 million |
| Language | English |
| IMDB Rating | 6.6/10 |
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Positive Aspects of VANTAGE POINT (2008)
There’s a lot to like about ‘Vantage Point’, with perhaps the most obvious being that it lives up to its title. Rather than telling a straight forward political thriller, we get instead the re-telling of the same event from the point of view of eight different strangers, each who end up connected to the main plot point which is the shooting of the President of the United States at a speech in Salamanca, Spain.
It would have been easy to make this gimmick, the re-telling of the story over and over again, a contrived and ultimately boring approach but director Peter Travis does an exceptional job of building tension and releasing new angles and information even though we see the same base event over and over again. The strongest revelation of course is that the President’s double is actually the one shot, but then it turns out the President gets targeted anyway at his secret base in a hotel several kilometres away, with the terrorists always being one step ahead. In the end, it takes one nervy Secret Service Agent (Dennis Quaid) and an innocent bystander on holiday (Forest Whitaker) to be the unpredictable parts of the equation that bring the terrorists’ plot undone.
The action is fast and frantic, never letting up for a second, with some razor sharp editing and sound. Perhaps even stronger still is that there is no attempt to explain exactly why the terrorists are doing what they’re doing this is a film about how eight different people react to a catastrophic event and as such there is barely any motivational or political subtext which is actually a refreshing change. The idea that we get thrown in to the situation without much explanation and leave without much explanation is quite a strong, and different turn for a film of this genre to take.
Drawbacks of VANTAGE POINT (2008)
The one aspect of the film that didn’t quite gel with the rest of the storylines on offer was the Forest Whitaker, innocent bystander on a holiday story. You can see what the filmmakers were going for there but he at times feels arbitrarily put in, especially in the sequence where he’s chasing the bad guys to catch it all on camera for the Secret Service. An otherwise good actor, Whitaker seems like he’s over-doing it in some sequences.
By extension, his rescue of a young girl in the climax just happened to be fortuitous and miraculously managed to stop the fleeing terrorists with the captured US President just in time for Secret Service Agent Barnes (Quaid) to come to the rescue and declare that the President safe. However, this hardly seems to matter in the frenzy of action and intrigue on offer, still making for a solid and effective action-thriller.
Final Verdict
A highly effective action-thriller which tells its story in a refreshing, non-traditional plot line.
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