Review: 'Vantage Point' misses its target
Posted Tuesday, July 1, 2008 at 5:01 PM Central
by John Couture
The porn industry has been using the alternate angle feature on DVDs for many years now. It seems that Vantage Point director Pete Travis or screenwriter Barry L. Levin finally noticed. Because really, that's all this movie boils down to, one huge experiment in alternate angles.
Of course, with pornography I can decide when to move between angles. Here, I'm stuck with their repetitive use of the rewind button.
It's very rare for me to come across a movie that really doesn't sit well with me, but Vantage Point is one of those movies. Perhaps I came with my expectations set too high or I really wanted it to work, but at the end of the day, Vantage Point is just another gimmick movie that will neither be adored nor remembered as its gimmicky predecessor The Blair Witch Project.
What starts out as a decent premise, 8 strangers, 8 different points of view, quickly becomes cumbersome as they show the sequence of events and then rewind it to the beginning to get, you guessed it, another Vantage Point. They do this 5 or 6 times (you do lose count) until everyone reaches the climax together. I think the main downfall of this technique was too many rewinds.
Clue had much more success with only three different endings.
The cast is superb and each actor and actress is more than capable of carrying a movie of this caliber on their own, but instead they aren't given much meat to work with and the constant back and forth really negates any steam that one of them is able to build during their "Vantage Point."
I have to say that one actress who did stand out from the others and rise above the tragedy of work she was given was Zoe Saldana. She brings life to the screen as the punchy on location reporter lends the film a brief respite of sentimentality among the flying debris. Her portrayal reaffirms J.J. Abrams' decision to cast her as Lt. Uhura in the forthcoming Star Trek reboot.
On the contrary, the three "leads" Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox and Forest Whitaker seemingly phone it in at times and give very rigid cardboard cutouts of secret service agents and a tourist respectively. All three of these actors are better than this and we all know it. Again, I blame the source material and perhaps the directing more so than the actors themselves, but still their wooden performances must be pointed out.
All in all, what starts as an interesting premise quickly dissolves into a mish-mash of redundancy for redundancy sake. The film's running time stands at a robust 90 minutes, but it could've easily (and probably more effectively) been told in an hour.
Sadly, the movie won't leave you wanting more, but rather thankful that it's only an hour and a half of your life wasted.
SPECIAL FEATURES
You would think that a movie such as this would be overflowing with outtakes or deleted scenes, but you would be wrong. There is a smallish outtake feature and one deleted scene that, while introduced by the director, is pretty worthless in its inclusion.
The interviews with the cast and crew is probably the shining moment of this offering as it allows the venerable cast to talk about the project and what I wish we would've actually seen on-screen. These talented people were sadly taken for a ride as the end result didn't come close to the actual product. The stunt featurette is a hair more compelling than average, but it's not really something to hang your hat onto.
There's a little bit with the writer and again, when he talks about what the movie could be, it sounds quite awe-inspiring, but somewhere along the way, the ball is dropped. I can see now why Sony put the money behind this movie. I'd be willing to pony up $10 million for this guy, if I had $10 million lying around.
The standard director's commentary that accompanies such movies is just that. I will say that even Mr. Travis seems a little bored with the whole concept around the fourth or fifth rewind of events.
So, I thought for a moment that the diminished features I was seeing was only the result of Sony sending me the one disc regular DVD version and not the two disc "Deluxe Edition" or even the Blu-ray version, but those hopes were quickly dashed. The only things included on the "Deluxe Edition" not on the single edition was a Full Screen version of the movie (who cares?) and a digital copy that can be easily migrated to a portable media device, such as Sony's PSP.
The digital copy might be worth the added expense of $6 had this movie been worth a second viewing or a recommendation to friends.
The only feature exclusive to the Blu-ray version is a feature called "Vantage Viewer: GPS Tracker." It allegedly allows viewers to map character movements over the overlapping timelines. That might be interesting, but alas I didn't have a chance to review this feature and if you couldn't guee by now, I'm not going to run and spend my own hard-earned money for a Blu-ray copy to find out.
It's funny, I've never given a movie our lowest ranking of "Avoid It" and I really had to think long and hard on this one. After my deliberations, I concluded that it wasn't necessary to avoid this movie like the plague and the whole novel concept, while played out to death, might be worth a view at someone else's expense. So, borrow it from a friend or let him or her rent it and have a movie night with them.
