Vantage Point (2008)

Vantage Point arrives with a formal conceit and leaves with a car chase. It replays the same twenty minutes in Salamanca from eight vantage points, a structure that invites comparison to Kurosawa and then quietly loses that comparison in the first act. The film has no interest in the unreliability of memory or the elusiveness of truth. It wants to show us the same explosion from a different angle, then do it again, and then hand Dennis Quaid a commandeered car and a crowded street. There is a kidnapping, a body double, a suicide bomber disguised as a bellhop, and a small girl who wanders into traffic so that Forest Whitaker can sprint into the road. The machinery is loud and the gears are visible.

On the cultural ledger, the film makes a few modest deposits. Rex Brooks, the GNN producer, was written as a man and played by Sigourney Weaver, a decision the director has described as an effort to supply a strong female presence. Forest Whitaker's tourist was originally an overweight Eastern European, and was Americanized upon his casting. Around them sits a genuinely international ensemble: Zoe Saldana, Ayelet Zurer, Edgar Ramirez, Said Taghmaoui. These are casting choices, not arguments. The film never asks what any of it means. Identity here is staffing.

The screenplay does pause once to let William Hurt's president refuse a retaliatory strike, preferring to keep negotiations alive, which is a gesture toward restraint and not a sermon. Otherwise the film is a machine for generating suspense, and it is content to remain one. It has no thesis about power, no interest in who gets to be seen, and no appetite for instruction. What it has is a stopwatch and a very busy afternoon in Spain.