'Vantage': An Obtuse Conspiracy Angle

A terrorist-assassination tale like "Vantage Point" is supposed to appeal to your inner conspiracy theorist, and it must have been working: Immersed though I was in implausible dialogue and unlikely twists of fate, all I could think about was whether the release of all those JFK papers in Dallas this week -- after 44 years -- and the release the same week of a thriller concerning the murder of a president could possibly have been a coincidence.

Hmmm . . .

Just wondering. Less perplexing, but nettlesome all the same, is how this thriller was allowed to meander out of Columbia Pictures so overloaded with bad acting. Although it was held back by the studio for about a year, someone apparently came to the inevitable conclusion that no amount of ripening time -- even 44 years in a vault -- was going to help this gimmicky and ultimately harebrained movie. And so, welcome to your weekend.

There are many places one could lay blame for "Vantage Point." One would be the late Akira Kurosawa, whose original movie version of "Rashomon" made it chic for filmmakers to create multiple-perspective movies and, since they aren't Kurosawa, drive us crazy. Another direction, of course, would be director Pete Travis, abetted by a woeful script from Barry L. Levy, who sets up his story, such as it is, in Salamanca, Spain. There, the president of the United States (William Hurt) has come to announce the conclusion of an international agreement concerning the war on terror. And shots are almost immediately fired. And there's a loud bang. And then a huge explosion occurs in the city square, killing virtually no one -- no one with a name in the credits, anyway -- which allows Travis to rewind the story's first 23 minutes and lay out the same scenario from a different point of view. And to do this multiple times.

Multiple.

Times.

Conceivably, it might have worked. In reality, however, during the third or fourth reprise of the assassination/bombing, a member of my audience let out an involuntary "Oh God . . . " and the rest of the house erupted in sympathetic laughter.

A number of well-regarded actors, including Sigourney Weaver and Zoe Saldana, wander through "Vantage Point," but its ostensible star is Dennis Quaid, whose Secret Service agent Thomas Barnes has already taken a bullet for the president, and has just been placed back on the White House detail after recovering from his wound. The question is, has he recovered? Quaid wears a Clint Eastwood-inspired grimace during much of "Vantage Point," but all the pained looks in the world aren't going to make "Vantage Point" into "In the Line of Fire." Besides, if you need to see pain, just look at the person next to you.

The sense one gets -- Weaver is the best example -- is that the filmmakers were constrained by time and budget and had the use of certain performers for limited times. Weaver's harpy news producer Rex Brooks, whose outlet is covering the president's appearance, is seen only in her TV booth; Saldana is shown via one remote camera. Although "Vantage Point" does a lot of repetitive time traveling, emotionally it's immobile: There's insufficient attention paid to anyone, and so no single character, Quaid's included, provides the focus of any emotional investment.

No, the star of the movie, as it is in the current "Cloverfield" -- and will be until audiences finally rebel in dizziness and despair -- is The Camera. While imposing his multiple angles on what is essentially a very skinny story, Travis relies heavily on what one would see through a viewfinder, or on the monitors in the TV booth. Virtually an entire segment is devoted to life though the DVCAM of melancholy tourist Howard Lewis (Forest Whitaker, the best thing in the film).

As "Vantage Point" indicates, the mechanism of picture-taking has become more of a character than it's ever been, but that's not necessarily a favorable development. Camera movement/extreme version does deliver a certain fashionable twitchiness, imbuing a thriller with a kinetic energy it can't, or won't, achieve through story or, Heaven knows, acting. But here, it's dissipated via theatrical imbalance: Having embraced screenwriter Levy's "Rashomon"-like conceit, Travis is faced with having to construct chapters of equal length, but which don't necessarily contain equal doses of drama. This leads to idleness, static and inertia.

"Vantage Point" asks a lot of us: Virtually every twist and turn in its not-quite-serpentine plot relies on a camera being in exactly the right place at the right time, and the person looking through that camera -- or at the image it's creating -- at precisely the right moment. When such things happen so irritatingly often, it can't be just coincidence. But it might be a conspiracy.

Vantage Point (90 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG-13 for sequences of intense violence and action, some disturbing images and brief strong language.