Posted on: June 29, 2008 Posted by: James McQuiston Comments: 0

Vantage Point is an odd type of whodunit. The movie starts off with a shooting – at a televised event, the President of the United States is shot by an assassin’s bullet at a counter-terrorism conference. Eight different individuals have a clear view of what they feel to be the truth about the assassin, but their stories are all different. What viewers will begin to understand is that no one individual has all of the information about what truly happened, and it takes a ninth iteration, showcasing the perpetrators, to really understand the scope of the attack. The cast is simply fantastic; William Hurt plays the President, while Sigourney Weaver, Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, Eduardo Noreiga, and Forest Whitaker round out the individuals that had actually seen the assassination.

There are a bevy of special features to be had with this release of Vantage Point. Perhaps most informative of these special features have to be the commentary that is present with Pete Travis, the film’s director. A close second in terms of applicability to the film would be the “An Inside Perspective” featurette, which provides personal theories and further explanations for the movie by a number of cast and crew members that were intimately associated with the film. Other featurettes, such as “Plotting an Assassination” and “Coordinating Chaos” provide information regarding the nuts and bolts of the movie, but vary in the level of usefulness in regards to further unraveling the mystery that is Vantage Point. What I would personally like to see on further iterations of Vantage Point would be a further featurette that shows the influences of Kurosawa on the style of filming that Vantage Point uses: Dennis Quaid himself referred to Vantage Point as “Rashomon” (a Kurosawa film) during an interview on American TV.

If you like your thrillers with a high level of suspense and your perceptions rapidly changed over the course of an hour and a half about who committed the crime, then Vantage Point has to be the next movie that you purchase. Further props have to go to Sony for providing a robust slate of featurettes that further flesh out some of the nuances that may not be immediately discernible on a viewer’s first few viewings of Vantage Point. Make sure to pick up your copy of Vantage Point when the movie is released on 1 July.

Rating: 7.2/10

Vantage Point / 2008 Sony / 90 Minutes / http://www.sonypictures.com /

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