Vantage Point: Assassination Fun

Deer season, rabbit season, duck season: these have their places on the hunters’ calendar. But in movie melodrama, shooting-the-President season knows no limits. Death of a President, the British fakeumentary that imagined the assassination of George W. Bush and the succeeding imposition of martial law by the new President Cheney, was a sensation at the Toronto Film festival in September 2006, though it had little impact when it opened in the U.S. six weeks later. Last March, Shooter pinned the murder of an unidentified U.S. Commander in Chief on Mark Wahlberg, who was then obliged to uncover a government-wide conspiracy of high-level killers. And for the past six years, on 24, home viewers have spent two dozen evenings each season contemplating murderous plots that penetrate the Oval Office and threaten to change administrations with explosive suddenness.

So why wouldn’t Hollywood open its latest the-Prez-is-dead movie on the 276th birthday of the country’s first President? Once we had white sales on the Washington’s Day holiday; now we have blood-red fantasies of the killing of a fictional Chief Executive, told in a faux-real style that summons old memories of Nov. 22, 1963, and a more recent nightmare snapshot, from last Dec. 27, of Benazir Bhutto felled by bullets and bombs. Oh, it’s nothing personal, current office holders. Not even political. It’s just business — the movie business. If there’s anything a mogul loves, on the screen and in the box office cash register, it’s dead Presidents.

Sure enough, Vantage Point scored with surprisingly robustness at the wickets, outperforming the predictions of industry analysts and seeming likely to be the weekend’s No. 1 attraction. With the aid of film-biz hindsight, we can realize what Barry L. Levy, the film’s writer, and its director, Pete Travis, figured out about the assassination genre: (1) that it can easily be fit into a standard action scenario and (2) that the plot can be split six or eight ways, into as many points of view. Each witness to the assassination provides important fragments of the information needed for the viewer to figure out whodunit and whether the perps will get away with their atrocity.

The movie begins in a TV-news remote trailer in Salamanca, Spain, where the hassled, blinkered executive producer (Sigourney Weaver) is trying to steer live coverage of a peace summit toward bland bromides and away from the anti-U.S. demonstrations on the periphery of the event. Once the assassins’ shots hit their human target and a large bomb disperses the crowd, the movie flashes back 23 mins. and starts all over again, in be-kind-rewind fashion, and we get the perspectives of President Ashton (William Hurt), two of his Secret Service bodyguards (Dennis Quaid and Matthew Fox), an American tourist bystander (Forest Whitaker) and a few of the terrorists as they develop their scheme and attempt their escape.

Vantage Point is a wan title for such a bustling movie. (Since it’s William Hurt in the terrorists’ gun sights, it could be called Kill Bill.) But if it hints at the title of a famous 1970 car chase movie, Vanishing Point, that makes sense, since the new film argues that terrorists can be tracked down not by super-sleuthing or political back-channeling, but because of the fanatically assured driving skills of a lone government agent. The film also has echoes of a few other cluttered frescoes that play out in a limited time-frame: Vantage Point, reduced to essentials, is Crash starring Jack Bauer.

Director Travis’s early claim to fame was the 2004 Omagh, a retelling of the massacre of 29 civilians in a Northern Island town a decade ago. That TV film’s script was co-written by Paul Greengrass, and Travis has borrowed some of the jittery camerabatics that Greengrass applied as director to of United 93and the last two episodes of the Jason Bourne saga. You can easily spot Travis’s attempt at docudrama bona fides from the gritty cinematography. All the 50-plus mid-level stars — Quaid, Hurt, Weaver, Bruce McGill — are shot (I mean photographed) so unflatteringly that they look weary, lined, older than John McCain on one of his recent bad days.

Early on, we learn that Secret Service Agent Thomas Barnes (Quaid) had taken a bullet for Ashton a year ago, so this is a least the second assassination attempt during the his regime. Ashton, though, is no ninny; stern and balding, he has the gruff gravitas of Fred Thompson or Rudy Giuliani, if either of them had got past their Presidential-primary gaffes and into the White House. And he is ready with heroic quotes for any occasion. When his adviser pleads, “Mr. President, we have to act strong,” Ashton snaps back, “No, we have to be strong.”

By this fourth or fifth rerun of the events, we have determined that Vantage Point has ambitions no higher than making the audience’s collective pulse race as fast as the car Quaid will be maneuvering breathlessly through rush-hour traffic. The movie is best seen as straightforward, sometimes harrowing melodrama, packed with mistaken identities, beautiful villains, a kindly tourist who can outrace the bad guys, and a lost little girl whom the film brazenly sends onto a highway full of speeding cars. It’s as if Dakota Fanning had wandered onto the streets of Ronin.

SPOILER ALERT / IDIOCY ADVISORY: You’re a terrorist who’s just pulled off an assassination plot that killed dozens of high-ranking U.S. officials and a few hundred innocent bystanders. Now you’re tearing through town in your getaway van with precious cargo in the back and a Secret Service agent on your tail. Would you hit the car breaks and risk being caught just to avoid running into a little girl on the highway?

But plausibility is the concern of the 9/11 Commission, not of audiences looking for an exciting time at a February popcorn picture. Their vantage point isn’t above the action, where they can dispassionately parse the plot and solve the mystery. It’s behind the wheel of Dennis Quaid’s churning vehicle, which sends innocent pedestrians sprawling as he pursues the bad guys. He’s Mel Gibson as Madman Martin Briggs, and he’s not in a sophisticated political parable like The Manchurian Candidate but the latest unofficial remake of Lethal Weapon.