BLU-RAY
REVIEW: VANTAGE POINT
06/28/08
In “Vantage Point” director
Pete Travis attempts to recreate the narrative structure of
master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomom. Using this style
the same event is told from many different perspectives.
This is a risky attempt as the movie can quickly become
repetitive and annoying, but if done successfully it can be
quite a feat. Pete Travis achieves neither and the result is
an ordinary film with a couple of exciting action scenes and
a half-decent twist.
President Ashton (William Hurt) is in Salamanca, Spain
attending an anti-terrorism summit. As he makes his way to
the podium, he is shot. At his side are secret servicemen
Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid) and Kent Taylor (Matthew Fox)
who immediately begin looking for the shooter. In the crowd
are a few suspicious people including Howard Lewis (Forest
Whitaker), a tourist on his first trip to Europe who is
fascinated by his new HD camcorder, Suarez (Saïd Taghmaoui)
who strikes up a conversation with Howard Lewis, Enrique
(Eduardo Noriega) a police office in charge of protecting
the Mayor and Enrique’s lover Veronica (Ayelet Zurer). After
the shooting, a bomb blows up the stage, and Barnes who has
been out of service since taking a bullet for the president
is left to piece all the clues together. This is the first
perspective the one seen by the GNN news crew run by Rex
Brooks (Sigourney Weaver). At this point the movie rewinds
and re-starts, but now seen from another characters
perspective with each perspective revealing a little more
until all of the twists are finally revealed.
“Vantage Point” attempts an interesting concept, that
ultimately fails when the movie becomes repetitive. By the
third time you’ll be wishing they’d try something different.
Audiences don’t want to watch the same thing over and over.
They should have skipped the repetitive stuff and just
focused on the bottom line of each character’s perceptual
differences, but if they did this, movie would probably be
thirty minutes long. Also the rewind process that was used
to begin each new perspective was pretty lame. The audience
at my theater were laughing and taunting every time it would
happen. This didn’t help in keeping the mood of the film.
The only performance worth mentioning is that of Forest
Whitaker. The only thing is that you could probably take his
character completely out of the movie without affecting a
thing. The car chase is reminiscent of the Bourne films and
was cleverly done. The movie also has a couple of twist: One
that’s pretty good and the other is flat-out dumb. In the
end, you are left with an unsatisfactory ending and thinking
what was the point?
Review
By Brad Peterson
brad@smartcine.com
The Blu-Ray disc is
presented in a full HD 1080P Widescreen with an aspect
ratio of 2.40:1. The video is flawless like all the Sony
Home Entertainment releases. The audio is a Dolby TrueHD
5.1, that sound just perfect, especially during the
action scenes. The highlight of the disc without a
though is the GPS tracker, which let viewers track the
on-screen movements of each character throughout the
film’s overlapping timeline.
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VIDEO:
1080P Widescreen Version
AUDIO:
English, French
Spanish Portuguese Thai Dolby TrueHD 5.1
Subtitles: English, French, Portuguese Spanish
Korean Thai Chinese
SPECIAL FEATURES:
Deleted Scene: This deleted
scene don't add much to the film. It was a good idea to
leave this scene out.
An Inside Perspective: Interviews with the
Cast and Crew
Plotting an Assassination: Interview with
First-time Screenwriter Barry Levy
Commentary with Director Pete Travis
Exclusive to Blu-ray Disc™, Vantage Viewer: GPS
Tracker: This feature lets viewers track the
on-screen movements of each character throughout the film’s
overlapping timeline.
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