Loading ...“Vantage Point” stars Dennis Quaid, Forest Whitaker, William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, and many others. This is the directorial debut of Pete Travis and the story is written by first time writer Barry Levy.
The story follows the attempted assassination of the president of the United States, shown from total of eight different perspectives. These viewpoints include innocent bystanders, bodyguards and even the president himself. Each of these people have their own incidents that relate to the shooting and inadvertently tie in at the end.
My interest was scattered through the film, losing and gaining interest from time to time. The spectacular cast failed to completely impress. Each performance was below average. Especially Dennis Quaid, who adds yet another horribly unconvincing performance to his lists of efforts. He has this expression stamped on his face that is similar to Harrison Ford, confused and angry. He deserves an early worst actor nomination for his attempt here, it was horrendously bad.
The film does contain a few good chase scenes that are shot well and the action is non-stop, but the film is extremely repetitive. The president gets shot, an explosion occurs, then a chase scene shortly after. It even felt like a directorial debut with the director never really getting the actors to show what they are made of. William Hurt, Forrest Whitaker, and Sigourney Weaver are all great actors, yet the perform on subpar levels here. Just proof that the director failed in probing for convincing acting. There are many minor twists and turns, but no true surprises. We have the trailer to thank for that. It ruined the biggest twist in the movie.
Each perspective failed to climax until the end. It’s not a really bad movie, but I certainly wouldn’t watch it again. The downpour of bad acting by Dennis Quaid and the continuous rewinding of the movie, only to experience the same thing in a different perspective, left me very pleased when it finally ended. Viewing this movie once is like viewing it eight times, and that can’t be a good thing.
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May 13th, 2008 at 11:37 am
I am on board with your review to a certain extent. Once again, I think you are a nibble on the harsh side.
I was also on board with this film for the first act and part of the second. Then I got bored. I tried to give the acting the benefit of the doubt, but zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
The little girl thing was ridiculously stupid as well. In my opinion, it was deserving of nothing more than the cutting room floor.
After one or two too many rewinds, the ending was pretty good. It was a film that needed one last rewrite before being shot and needed a director more adept at drawing great performances from these actors.