Vantage Point (2008)

The attempted assassination of the American President is told and re-told from several different perspectives.

Director:

Pete Travis

Writer:

Barry Levy

Stars:

Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, Forest Whitaker

1 win & 2 nominations.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Dennis Quaid	...	Thomas Barnes
Matthew Fox	...	Kent Taylor
Forest Whitaker	...	Howard Lewis
Bruce McGill	...	Phil McCullough
Édgar Ramírez	...	Javier (as Edgar Ramirez)
Saïd Taghmaoui	...	Suarez
Ayelet Zurer	...	Veronica
Zoe Saldana	...	Angie Jones (as Zoë Saldana)
Sigourney Weaver	...	Rex Brooks
William Hurt	...	President Ashton
James Le Gros	...	Ted Heinkin
Eduardo Noriega	...	Enrique
Richard T. Jones	...	Holden
Holt McCallany	...	Ron Matthews
Leonardo Nam	...	Kevin Cross

Storyline

The President of the United States is in Salamanca, Spain, about to address the city in a public square. We see a plain-clothes cop, his girlfriend with another man, a mother and child, an American tourist with a video camera, and a Secret Service agent newly returned from medical leave. Shots ring out and the President falls; a few minutes later, we hear a distant explosion, then a bomb goes off in the square. Those minutes are retold, several times, emphasizing different characters' actions. Gradually, we discover who's behind the plot. Is the Secret Service one step ahead, or have the President's adversaries thought of everything?

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Plot Keywords:

president | explosion | shooting | secret service | american | 

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Taglines:

8 Strangers. 8 Points of View. 1 Truth.

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Genres:

Action | Crime | Drama | Thriller

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Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)

Rated PG-13 for sequences of intense violence and action, some disturbing images and brief strong language

Details

Official Sites:

Gaumont/Columbia TriStar Films [fr] Sony Pictures [au]

Country:

USA

Language:

English Spanish

Release Date:

22 February 2008 (USA)

Also Known As:

Angles d'attaque

Filming Locations:

Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico

Box Office

Budget:

$40,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend:

£1,454,636 (UK) (7 March 2008)

Gross:

$72,266,306 (USA) (18 April 2008)

Company Credits

Production Co:

Columbia Pictures, Relativity Media, Original Film

Technical Specs

Runtime:

90 min

Sound Mix:

SDDS Dolby Digital DTS

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

When shooting was moved to Mexico, the production design team built a replica of Salamanca's Plaza Mayor, which is slightly smaller than the original.

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Goofs

When Forest Whitaker runs across the pedestrian bridge, his camera is in his left hand. His hands are empty as he comes to a stop. When he raises his hand, the camera is in his right hand.

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Quotes

[first lines]
Mark Reinhart: Good morning, America. It's now 12 noon in Salamanca, Spain. In a short time, world leaders from over 150 countries meet here in Plaza Mayor to sign up to President Ashton's bold new counterterrorist strategy. Since 9/11, more than 4500 people have been killed in the rising tide of global terror. Those lives will not soon be forgotten as today, the world comes together to take a stand against this violence. We may be on the brink of a historic agreement between Western and Arab ...

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Connections

Featured in Hollywood's Top Ten: Dennis Quaid Movies (2011)

User Reviews

A good concept gone awry

One crime, multiple vantage points. Sounds cool right? Yes. But "Vantage Point" never really pulls it off quite how it sets itself up to. The result is a cool action flick with some clever storytelling that sort of fizzles in the end.

In "Vantage Point," the President of the United States (William Hurt) arrives in Salamanca, Spain to give a speech on global terrorism efforts and ties with Spain to improve them. He gets shot and then a bomb goes off killing many people. We get this story through the eyes of a variety of characters and by the end of the film know exactly what happened.

The cast is a solid mix of familiar and old faces. Dennis Quaid, Forest Whitaker, William Hurt, Matthew Fox (of LOST fame) and even Sigorney Weaver give this film the star power it requires. The terrorists are entirely new faces, which is no real surprise.

As the film first presents the vantage point concept, the first thirty or forty-five minutes develop a redundancy. You do get many new perspectives, but seeing the same events happen over and over again and the cheesy rewind sequences to establish a change in POV really gets a bit boring. Sometimes you're not really seeing something new, just the same old thing in a new way that doesn't really bring more insight into the plot. Sometime it does and it really helps the film, but mostly it's not the vantage points, but cutting the story off at pivotal moments and clues into the mystery so that when they're revealed in another perspective you can get excited. It's just good storytelling, nothing unique.

The film really loses its appeal, however, with the "final perspective." In fact, it's not really anyone's perspective. The writers sort of realized that adding five more perspectives to reveal the full mystery (which is what it would have taken) would really bother viewers and get absurdly repetitive, so they combined them all into a final twenty minute action sequence that is like any other normal action movie.

Was deviating from the concept in order to please viewers and keep the film short the best course of action? For this film, yes. Sticking to the concept would have made it bad considering the complexity of the plot. But even the ending can also be seen about 15 minutes prior to when it happens, so it's not really all that great. This film would have been better, however, if it could both stay true to the structural concept and please the viewer, which means first-time writer Barry Levy stretched his idea just a bit too far. ~Steven C

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