'Vantage Point'

Rating:

BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

February 22, 2008

The picturesque Spanish town of Salamanca is the unheralded star of "Vantage Point," an assassination thriller that boasts the glossy tourist vistas of an airline magazine combined with a serious case of instant-replay-itis.

Imagine if someone penciled, say, the X-Men, Elmer Fudd and Dudley Do-Right into the Zapruder tape, then played it back repeatedly, changing the focus each time so that you could view the shooting of President Kennedy from each of their perspectives.

The makers of "Vantage Point" up the ante by adding catastrophic bomb blasts to a presidential assassination, but they populate their ground zero with cartoon figures mouthing the sort of simplistic dialogue that tends to gravitate toward the corners of comic-strip frames, trapped in balloons.

Comic strips, of course, can be very topical and of-the-moment. But even "Doonesbury" achieves a gravitas that eludes the silly "Vantage Point," which uses 9/11 as its thinly-veiled launchpad and lobs an easy potshot at the current administration for pursuing a reactive war strategy in Iraq.

Instead of President Bush, we get President Ashton (William Hurt), a fantasy of Hollywood wishful thinking who would seem to have been minted from the same mold of eloquence and liberal fair play as Martin Sheen's executive on "The West Wing."

Within minutes of arriving in a crowded Spanish plaza for a summit on terrorism, Ashton is felled by a hail of bullets. The shots are swiftly echoed by the sound of a nearby explosion, which is followed by another explosion that levels much of the edifice surrounding the speaker's podium. Amid the chaos, a bearded figure with a gun dashes toward the prone American leader, and is promptly spirited away by Secret Service men.

We observe these events eight times, first through news cameras being monitored by TV producer Rex Brooks (a bossy-boots Sigourney Weaver), then from the perspectives of various participants. These include an agitated Secret Service man (Dennis Quaid) working his first big public gathering after a traumatic past incident, his take-charge colleague (Matthew Fox), a busybody American tourist (Forest Whitaker), the bearded gunman (the compelling Eduardo Noriega) and the president himself.

Despite the echoes of "Rashomon," the Kurosawa film which famously revisited a rape-murder through four sets of eyes, "Vantage Point" trafficks in corrupted points of view. While the varying perspectives enable us to revise our sense of what actually went down, each chapter contains information that could never be available to the character at its focus. It's a big, adrenalin-pumping cheat.

As the characters collide with drunken repetition, "Vantage Point" begins to resemble one of those crisis-management potboilers by Arthur Hailey set in large gathering places. In the film's most ludicrous segment, Whitaker (all smiles and dash), succeeds in being even more irritating than Helen Hayes' cuddly old lady stowaway in "Airport." Playing that latest wrinkle on the ugly American, the camera junkie who can only experience life through a view finder, Whitaker is abetted by a divining rod camcorder that points in the most urgency-laden direction at any given moment.

VANTAGE POINT (PG-13). A presidential assassination from eight different perspectives. Fast, noisy, superficially clever. With Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, Forest Whitaker, William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Eduardo Noriega. Directed by Pete Travis. 1:30 (sequences of intense violence and action, some disturbing images and brief strong language). At area theaters.