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The Review - AT THE MOVIES with WILLIAM HALL
Published: 6 March 2008

Forest Whitaker plays a tourist who
captures the moment the US President is assassinated

Views of President shooting make good point

VANTAGE POINT
Directed by PETE TRAVIS
Certificate 12a

WELCOME to a non-stop action thriller that doesn’t mess about.
We are sucked into it from the opening moments as the US President (William Hurt) arrives in a motorcade in a packed Spanish square to sign a ground-breaking anti-terrorist treaty with other world leaders.
It’s a huge deal, fraught with the fear of assassination, and Secret Service agent Tom Barnes (Dennis Quaid) knows the problems as well as anyone and better than most.
Tom is back in the front line, maybe a little too soon after taking two bullets in the chest to save the President’s life a few months earlier.
Now, twitchy-fingered and full of self-doubt, he sees an assassin behind every curtain, a sniper’s rifle in every shadow.
Sure enough, shots ring out, and the President is gunned down from a nearby window. Panic-stricken crowds flee in all directions.
Then a massive bomb goes off. The twist in this adrenalin-fuelled thriller is that we are given eight versions of the atrocity from eight different points of view, proving what we all know: that one eye-witness can seldom grasp the whole truth. After each “segment” we return to 12 noon, with the motorcade entering the square, for a new perspective, new suspects and fresh clues.
Only at the end do we get the full story – and even then I’m not sure that all the ends are totally sewn up. But does it matter? For once, no!
The action begins in a TV control room with no-nonsense producer Sigourney Weaver shouting orders down the line as the story explodes on a dozen screens in front of her.
The body count leaps through the heat barrier as agent Matthew Fox (you may know him as Jack in the TV series Lost) chases a white-coated suspect (Edgar Ramirez) through dark alleys and up rotting staircases. Bullets fly. Cars and buses pile up on the highway.
Add confused tourist Forest Whitaker, taking camcorder shots for all he’s worth and getting all the suspects on his tiny screen. They include a beautiful girl (Ayelet Zurer) who may or may not be the ring-leader of a shadowy Moroccan cell.
It all adds up to a furious mix of Groundhog Day and In the Line of Fire, filmed at the speed of 24. Admittedly there are a heap of absurdities – but ignore them and just hang on for the ride.

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