Real Reviews - Vantage Point

Vantage Point follows 8 different people and their involvement in an assassination attempt on the President. The movie runs a few times from the different perspectives giving almost a sort of Run Lola Run repetitive feel for most of the movie.

Mainly it follows Dennis Quaid, who is a secret service agent assigned to protect the president, as he tries to solve the mystery and keep the president safe. Forrest Whitaker is one of the innocent bystanders that just happens to be recording every little detail of the assassination attempt and the things going on around the time of the incident (seemed a little too convenient for me).

Everything Else

The directing was very interesting in Vantage Point, so lets start with that. Vantage Point starts out from the media perspective and then follows different characters during the same time frame. This made it seem very repetitive, but at the same time allows the director to reveal another piece of the puzzle with each run. This makes each scene more exciting because you know that you are going to discover something new this time around. We have seen this before in films, but maybe not to this degree. Each take or “Vantage Point” seemed rather fresh even though it often had plenty of reused footage.

Character interactions were great especially among Dennis Quaid and Forrest Whitaker. Funny thing is that I watched The Last King of Scotland the other night and now I see Whitaker as a simple bystander to some event like this. His acting ability is quite impressive as he was completely believable as a President and ruler of a nation and as a simple man just happening to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The acting on Quaid’s part was nothing short of excellent, with intensity that sets him apart from others. I am not sure what it is about him, but he just seems sincere.

The scripting held the dialog together and the story and characters developed well with the exception of the motivation and goals of the “bad guys.” I felt this is where the film lacked the most. When I got to the end I felt that I had been cheated of some essential back story. In spite of this, Vantage Point was an exciting and fresh movie with plenty of fast paced thrills.

The Real Deal

The Drive-In ended up being the theater this time. I always like to go to the drive-in, but usually they are not playing the movie we want to see. The only problem this time was that about half way through the movie the screen lost a little focus and seemed a bit soft. Thankfully I did not get too upset (at least not to the point of ruining the movie experience), but it was certainly a distraction and could have been a lot better without the blurriness. For a minute or two I thought that my vision had suddenly gotten a lot worse.

Vantage Point kept the excitement up for the full 90 minutes it was playing, but it failed to deliver some of the most important elements for making the emotion and back story come to life. If they had added about 30 minutes and put a little more emotion and back story into it, it could have been great.

So I guess the question is… did this movie live up to what I had discussed in yesterday’s post? Vantage Point lived up to the expectation that the movie did not have what it took to stand out among last fall’s movie releases and therefore it seems like a good move to have put it here. I expect it to do well over the weekend because it is a good movie, but I don’t expect it to win any awards, so why would they worry about it being forgotten. Looks like it is all about the money. And really I can’t blame them.

The Short Version

Raw Score: 803,899
Sharon Movie? No

Source: Dave’s Movie Reviews

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