Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
2/23/08
Remember
how exciting it was the first time you saw Pulp Fiction and marveled
at the fact that the out-of-sequence presentation of its' three interlocking
stories isn't just a gimmick, but in fact gives the story more impact than
it would have had if all events had simply been told in chronological order?
A great moment and a classic movie, to be sure, but it didn't come without
a price. Tarantino's success has made it possible for less gifted
filmmakers to play their own structural games, often with vastly inferior
results. Case in point: Vantage Point, an entertaining
political assassination thriller with the heart of an 80's action movie
and the structure of Rashomon. Those two great tastes don't
taste great together, and while the multiple perspectives trick is OK,
once the movie gets down to business for an action-packed finale, it's
only too clear that a cast of characters more at home in Die Hard
than Atonement could have used a lot more
room to breathe. Vantage Point is good, but if it had trusted
itself to be what it so clearly is, it could have been great.
Five
times, we witness the same period of roughly one hour in and around a Spanish
anti-terrorism summit through the eyes of five different participants.
In order, they are TV news Producer Rex Brooks (Sigourney Weaver), Secret
Service Agent Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid), Spanish cop Enrique (Edwardo
Noriega), American tourist Howard Lewis (Forest Whitaker), and US President
Ashton (William Hurt). Other players include Barnes' partner Kent
Taylor (Matthew Fox), terrorists Veronica (Ayelet Zurer) and Suarez (Said
Taghmaoui) and another cop named Javier (Edgar Ramirez). If you've
seen the trailer, you know the hour pretty well. Barnes draws his
first assignment since taking a bullet for Ashton, who's preparing to give
a major speech before a large crowd while Lewis tapes the whole thing with
his camcorder. Then terrorists run amok in a hail of bullets and
bombs, but who's behind it? How did they pull it off? And what
is their ultimate plan? A final run through the day from everyone's
point of view will answer all our questions.
The
funny thing about Vantage Point is that it spends 2/3 of its' running
time on a pretty extreme gimmick (unlike Rashomon, there are no
narrators and no framing story: time just keeps rewinding back to
the same 12:00 pm to see things again through a different character's eyes),
and then abandons it entirely. Even stranger is that the movie gets
better once it does: Quaid's shell-shocked bodyguard, Hurt's butt-kicking
President and Whitaker's sad-sack family man are first-class action movie
characters who've been trapped in an art house flick and finally get to
come out and play. A climactic car chase is among the best I've seen
in a while, and while I saw the third act's Big Twist coming, it really
kicks the story up a notch. And it's here that we finally get to
meet the story's villains, led by the splendidly diabolical Taghamaoui.
The
five runs through the morning's events are never less than interesting,
but they also don't do a lot to improve on simply showing us those same
scenes chronologically. They keep most of the movie's best characters
off-screen for too long, and frame the narrative in terms of mystery rather
than action, making it harder to invest emotionally in a conventional action
climax (even a really good one). What keeps them from getting dull
is good acting across the board. Quaid (who's aged nicely into a
Harrison Ford-style grizzled man of action) and Whitaker (among our warmest
and most smoothly sympathetic screen presences) are in their wheelhouse,
while Fox gets to add a few notes to his range (hell, he doesn't even cry).
Taghamaoui, who utters the trailer's wonderful line about “American arrogance”,
fills Suarez with such delicious arrogance of his own that I imagined him
drinking from a “#1 Terrorist” mug at home. But the movie's best
performance comes from Hurt: it's hard to know what you're going
to get from him in any given role, but here he gets a chance to trot out
his too infrequently-seen star power as a POTUS you could easily imagine
kicking terrorist butt on Air Force One. He also gets some
great lines and shows real Fantasy President resolve: you can just
feel Hollywood itching to break out the Cool Movie Presidents again if
a Democrat wins the election this November.
I'll
credit writer Barry Levy with assembling lots of good elements, even if
he's too clever by half in his choices about how to present them.
The terrorist plot is ingeniously tricky and cold-blooded, and there's
only one moment when a character (Enrique, the least interesting and most
poorly motivated across the board) behaves in an irrational manner dictated
by how he's supposed to look in someone else's slice of the movie.
Pete Travis, a TV director making his feature debut, gets good work from
his great cast, and skillfully stages his action. Atli Orvarsson
(making his major studio debut after a lot of TV work of his own) chips
in a fine score.
It's
appropriate that Vantage Point opens on Oscar weekend, when Hollywood
celebrates its' eternal desire to break free of making the kind of movies
people want to see in favor of the ones it wants to make. The irony,
of course, is that as hard as Travis and Levy try, there's just no art
here, but the commerce on display is formidable. Someday, I'd love
to see some enterprising guy with a DVD copy and some video editing software
flatten the movie out and put all its' scenes in simple chronological order:
I bet it would rock. But for what it is, Vantage Point still
delivers enough of the goods to make it worth your while if you're a fan
of the Secret Service action subgenre. It might also function as
that warning label Pulp Fiction should always have carried for future
time-warping filmmakers: Don't try this at home. |
