Vantage Point

Brodie Fanns!

It's been a week since I last saw you guys. Seriously, a week. Since the Oscars, really. And there is a perfectly logical explanation for that. That whole live blog thing I was doing, I was doing on 3 different blogs. And that took a lot out of me. It was tiring. Plus I had a few days off work, so I just sat around getting drunk all week.

Anywho!

Here's a new review-

Vantage Point

3 Stars

It’s a good movie that keeps you guessing, has interesting plot twists and is well acted all around. It’s a bad movie where the plot would have been a really good season of 24.

Vantage Point is told Rashomon style (log onto IMDb and look it up), and we get several interesting perspectives on a terror plot to assassinate the president of the United States in Spain. And thanks to that nice little summary, my blog is now “one of interest” to several government agencies. We get the perspective of Secret Service agents Thomas Barnes and Kent Taylor (Dennis Quaid and Matthew Fox), tourist Howard Lewis (Forest Whitaker), the terrorists, their pawns, a news crew (Sigourney Weaver and Zoe Saldana and even the president himself (William Hurt). It all culminates in a pulse pounding series of chase sequences, ending in glorious American cinema fashion: dead bad guys, heroically and miraculously alive good guys.

For what comes off as Die Hard meets 24 with a little Bourne Identity thrown in mix, it really isn’t as bad as it could have been. The mixed narrative gets a little annoying because some versions overlap with other versions, so you’re getting the same story over and over, rather than multiple yet separate stories.

I’ve long thought of Dennis Quaid as the poor man’s Harrison Ford. Which I still stand behind. But you have to remember, even if you’re getting discount store Harrison Ford, Dennis Quaid is the Target version- still really cool. At least he’s not Tom Berenger, the K-Mart Harrison Ford. It was good to see Matthew Fox take on this kind of role, as you can see him start to shed the “Jack Shephard” image he’s been relishing in for the past three and a half years. I’m interested to see what he does as Racer X in Speed Racer come May. Edgar Ramirez continues his streak of roles requiring him to be the mysterious Latino with a steely glare. But if I were making a movie that had a mysterious Latino with a steely glare in it, I would pick Ramirez, as he’s not a bad actor, just needs to step out of the typecasting.

As I said before, my interest in the plot starts to fall apart during the first act when they’re constantly re-showing the assassination. Luckily once that’s over about 40 minutes in, we can settle in on some good, old-fashioned, pulse-pounding action fun. And it doesn’t skimp on that. It is an unfortunate page right out of Jason Bourne’s playbook though, and at times, I thought I had been magically transported to the summer of ’02 and was watching Matt Damon speed around a European city.

But while it does draw a lot of comparison to previous works, it still is an enjoyable film. I predict we’ll see some heavy rotation on the USA network in a few years, as this flick seems right up their alley.

- Brodie Mann