Movie review: 'Vantage Point' covers all the angles

'Vantage Point" is an assassination thriller that revisits the scene of the crime again and again, like a conspiracy theorist obsessively rewinding the Zapruder film. Borrowing the narrative structure from Stanley Kubrick's 1956 noir gem "The Killing" (re-used by Quentin Tarantino in 1991's "Reservoir Dogs"), the crime is told and retold from the perspective of a half-dozen witnesses, plotters and innocent bystanders. Its kaleidoscopic format -- a hailstorm of flashbacks, alternate angles and visual echoes -- turns standard action fare into stylish, savvy entertainment.

A visit by U.S. President Ashton (William Hurt) to an antiterrorism conference in Spain offers the bad guys just the opportunity they desire for an earthshaking counterstrike. At a photo op in a crowded plaza, shots are fired, Ashton goes down, Secret Service agents Dennis Quaid and Matthew Fox take off after the villains, an explosion rocks the scene and chaos erupts. Sigourney Weaver, jaw agape in shock, plays a TV news director whose on-the-spot editing decisions are a crash course in writing history on the fly. We see how images that she deliberately omits (anti-Ashton demonstrators) and others that she instinctively throws on the air (fire, stampeding crowds, casualties) become a messy first draft of the tragedy.

We get only so far into the story before the film cuts to an earlier part of the day. We follow a Spanish policeman (Eduardo Noriega) as he arrives in the public square, butts heads with the American security men, then chases two assassins to a tense showdown; once his part in the story is over we cut to American tourist Forest Whitaker, cheerfully videotaping the excitement before the president's arrival, and so on. Breaking down the story, withholding information and giving every character a parallel chapter creates an intricate framework of suspense.

But this is hardly the only reason to watch "Vantage Point." Irish TV director Pete Travis (a colleague of "United 93" and "The Bourne Supremacy" director Paul Greengrass) is a whiz at creating battleground carnage that stops just this side of gruesome reality. He supplies all the necessary genre thrills -- tire-smoking car chases, running gun battles in the streets and a satisfyingly high body count -- while evoking powerful work from his cast. There is extraordinary depth of feeling in Whitaker's shell-shocked performance, Quaid makes his bodyguard a machine tooled for action, and Hurt swiftly sketches a commanding commander-in-chief; only the terrorist mastermind and his femme fatale seem like stock figures from a spy novel. Grounding the inventively structured story in a degree of human reality keeps it from spiraling into jump-cut frenzy. While it's no classic, "Vantage Point" is well worth a look.

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186

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