Calling Vantage Point a Rashomon-lite is both an insult to Kurosawa's enigmatic classic and an awfully lazy way of describing director Pete Travis' silly, amateurish thriller. It's true that Vantage Point, like Rashomon, offers multiple accounts of the same key event (a presidential assassination), each from the perspective of a different participant. But the similarities end where they begin, and Vantage Point's structure quickly reveals itself as an annoyingly transparent gimmick for making a rather run-of-the-mill action flick seem far more intriguing than it actually is.
The titular points of view belong to a shell-shocked secret service agent (Dennis Quaid), an American tourist with a camera (Forrest Whitaker), a Spanish cop with romantic problems straight out of a telenovela (Edgar Ramirez), the president himself (William Hurt) and a bunch of slimy Islamic terrorists. For all the points of view and frantic running around, though, there's very little going on here — just the same information tediously replaying numerous times from slightly different perspectives without really adding much that's new. When the big switcheroo moments do finally announce themselves, they're so clumsily executed (complete with at least one character bugging his eyes and exclaiming, "Oh my god!"), that you might just find yourself laughing out loud.
The movie probably would have played better as straight-out comedy. Quaid's performance is total ham, and most of the other actors are equally cheesy or wasted (Sigourney Weaver, who only has a few lines, seems to be in pain here). It's not exactly Rush Hour with delusions of being Crash or Babel, but it's not far off.
Vantage Point (PG-13) Stars Dennis Quaid, Forrest Whitaker, Edgar Ramirez, William Hurt, Matthew Fox and James LeGros. Opens Feb. 22 at local theaters. 1 star
This article appears in Feb 20-26, 2008.