From left, Forest Whitaker, Dennis Quaid and Matthew Fox in the thriller Vantage Point. Watch the Trailer: http://movies.aol.com/movie/vantage-point/26378/main
This movie is doing well at the box office. It's filling a void for fast-paced action/mysteries and also wants to play tricks with the viewer. The gimmick here is that the plot unfolds through multiple retellings of the same events. Dennis Quaid plays a Secret Service agent who fails to protect the president during an assassination attempt and races to find those behind it. Everyone is a suspect but who are the real perpetrators hiding in the ensuing confusion following the attempt. Nothing is as it seems as he learns while unraveling events with the help of video cameras and eye witnesses.
Here's where the gimmick overpowers the plot. Each retelling begins further in time than the last one and also propels it further, almost like leap frogs. but we learn more about the previous one. At first the repetition of these flash backs became tiresome as the audience groaned a bit, including me. I read about this happening in theaters so it wasn't only us. But eventually the filmmakers wisely dropped them for real time as the story raced to the frantic conclusion. All the previous events tie together, perhaps a bit too neatly, for a suspenseful chase scene that made you forgive the earlier editing hocus-pocus.
Performances were competent for this kind of movie and the plot was intriguing if you stuck with it. This movie demands your full attention as a lot of plot twists are crammed into this no frills story. Perhaps the only fault with the movies is that you're not allowed to think about what happens; the filmmakers do it all for you. But this shouldn't stop you from enjoying Vantage Point.
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