Vantage Point

March 14, 2008

Definitely not a movie I would have picked myself, but infinitely better than the other films that my boss had to choose from – Jumper, The Spiderwick Chronicles, Fool’s Gold or Definitely, Maybe. A workplace team-building activity brought me to my first movie of 2008. After several hours of PowerPoint Presentations, we all got to enjoy popcorn, beer and a movie. (Some of us did NOT get to enjoy a beer, although our 9 months pregnant mouth watered at the prospect of an ice cold Corona.)

Dennis Quaid plays a Secret Service Agent assigned to protect the President at a Terrorism Summit in Spain. Although Quaid took a bullet for the President a year or so ago, there seems to be some question as to his fitness for duty. When the President is taken down by a bullet, it’s up to Quaid to figure out who’s behind the assassination attempt.

The summary above is overly simplistic, but if I said anything more, it would ruin the film. I don’t think that Vantage Point would have worked for me at all if I had known anymore about it than that. The only other thing that you have to know is that the structure is kind of like zooming out on Google Maps – the story restarts several times and pulls out to encompass a different point of view, which of course gives you more of the story. The structure does start to get old – by the time the last point-of-view rolled around, Vantage Point was starting to seem a bit more like Groundhog Day.

Even though I left the theater with a raging headache from the handheld camera work in the chase scene at the end (a chase scene in an action movie is hardly a spoiler, is it?), Vantage Point was a fairly entertaining film. The writers managed to keep a few surprises tucked away until the end and even though everything was tied up in a neat little package with a pretty pink bow by the end, I didn’t feel overly screwed over.