Van­tage Point is an awe­some tech­ni­cal achieve­ment, and I don’t mean to damn it with faint praise. Direc­tor Pete Travis and writer Barry Levy demon­strate excel­lent plot­ting, spa­tial sense, edit­ing, logis­tics, and con­ti­nu­ity. As a thriller it moves for­ward relent­lessly, and feels com­pre­hen­si­ble, self-contained, and very satisfying.

Van­tage Point is struc­tured around a sin­gle gim­mick, but it’s a good one. As one of the cin­e­matic chil­dren of Rashomon (includ­ing The Usual Sus­pects and Courage Under Fire), it retells the same event from mul­ti­ple points of view. An assas­si­na­tion attempt on the US pres­i­dent in Spain is foiled by vet­eran Secret Ser­vice agent Thomas Barnes (Den­nis Quaid) and civil­ian Howard Lewis (For­est Whitaker). The advan­tage of the struc­ture is to with­hold infor­ma­tion and cre­ate sus­pense. The first time we spot Lewis, from the hyper-cautious Barnes’ per­spec­tive, he seems to be act­ing fishily. But when we soon see the events from his point of view, we learn he’s an inno­cent. But the struc­ture works the other way; almost a full hour passes until we see fel­low Secret Ser­vice agent Taylor’s (Matthew Fox) side of the story, and the sim­ple fact of his pro­longed absence causes the audi­ence to sus­pect him. At about the one-hour mark, the rigid, neat struc­ture breaks down and we begin to see sliv­ers of each character’s expe­ri­ences mixed together, as they all draw to a sin­gle time and place for the climax.

A turkey in every pot and a thriller in every multiplex

But the cru­cial falling-down point of the movie is the trumped-up assas­si­na­tion plot itself, which is seem­ingly crafted for max­i­mum sto­ry­telling drama and not real-world ter­ror­ist effi­cacy. Would an actual suc­cess­ful assas­si­na­tion be so hi-tech and com­plex? This plot relies on lots of wire­less tech­nol­ogy, split-second tim­ing, black­mail (coerc­ing some­one to per­form key tasks bet­ter off done by some­one the plot­ters could count on) and at least two inside men (one of whom must have spent almost a life­time prepar­ing). This is how ter­ror­ism works in the movies. Real-life assas­sins tend to be lone gun­men who man­age to slip through secu­rity with their sheer unpre­dictabil­ity, and ter­ror­ist attacks like Okla­homa City and 9/11 didn’t depend on tech­nol­ogy more com­plex than fer­til­izer and box cut­ters. While we’re on the sub­ject, what are these par­tic­u­lar assas­sins’ moti­va­tions, exactly? It becomes clear they don’t wish to kill the pres­i­dent but to cap­ture him. What­ever they hope to accom­plish, they seem quite pleased with themselves.

OK, every­body skootch in a lit­tle… say cheese!

All of these ques­tions are negated in the end by a news broad­cast that claims that a lone assas­sin has been shot and killed. This con­clu­sion plays to the public’s lust for con­spir­acy the­o­ries than con­tin­ues to plague 9/11 (an inside job? please, spare me) and the JFK assassination.

Extra obser­va­tions:

• One of the biggest plot twists is spoiled in the trailer.

• Barnes is a cliché we’ve seen before, played by Clint East­wood in In the Line of Fire.

• There’s an oddly tiny role for Sigour­ney Weaver as tele­vi­sion news direc­tor Rex Brooks. Was there more intended for her char­ac­ter? Per­haps she took the role for an oppor­tu­nity to spend a few days in Spain.

• Hey, it’s Hollywood’s go-to mid­dle east­ern guy, Saïd Tagh­maoui (from The Kite Run­ner and the Iraqi tor­turer in Three Kings). He does turn out to be a vil­lain, but so do two white dudes, so the movie totally isn’t racist.

Offi­cial movie site: www.vantagepoint-movie.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

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