Vantage Point DVD Review
Ever hear the saying that if X number of people witness a crime, you’ll get X number of differing accounts of what happened/descriptions of the suspect? Well, Vantage Point is a little bit like that.
My Rating: 
Vantage Point is set in Spain during a major world event, where the President of the United States (played by William Hurt of Into The Wild, Syriana) is addressing the nation about terrorism. When shots are fired, Vantage Point rewinds the major event and tells it from eight different vantage points. Among the perspectives are President Ashton; Dennis Quaid (Smart People, In Good Company) as Thomas Barnes, a Secret Service agent; Matthew Fox (“Lost”, We Are Marshall) as Kent Taylor, Barnes‘s partner; Forest Whitaker (Street Kings, The Last King of Scotland) as Howard Lewis, a tourist who just so happened to catch a significant incident on his camcorder; Said Taghmaoui as suspicious Suarez ; Sigourney Weaver (Infamous, Tadpole) as news network director Rex Brooks; Zoe Saldana (Guess Who) as a doe eyed reporter on the scene; and Eduardo Noriega as an undercover Spanish police officer.
The film also stars Bruce McGill (The Lookout, Rubnaway Jury), James Le Gros (Zodiac, Trust The Man), Holt McCallany (“Heroes”, Alpha Dog), and Leonardo Nam (The Perfect Score).
Director Pete Travis (Henry VIII) and writer Barry Levy offer plenty of plot twists along the way to Vantage Point’s climactic conclusion, and while the story is interesting and the acting entertaining, overall the plot stars to fall flat upon the umpteenth retelling.
Vantage Point has a runtime of 90 minutes and is presented in 2.35 : 1 aspect ratio, with audio in Dolby Digital and optional Spanish, French, Portuguese and Thai languages. Subtitles are available in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese (simplified or traditional), Korean, Thai, and English (SDH or traditional).
Extras include three featurettes. The first, “An Inside Perspective,” runs almost half an hour and features the director and cast discussing various aspects of the making of the film, including the weather in Mexico, where the film was shot. The second, “Plotting an Assassination,” runs just over 15 minutes and touches on the writing process and piecing together the storyline. The third, “Coordinating Chaos,” is a short about the stuntwork for the film, including the explosion scene, car chases and car crashes. The extras are rounded out by an “outtake” with director Pete Travis, and an audio commentary with Travis, where he expands on information covered in the featurettes, as well as shares some new tidbits.
Vantage Point is rated PG-13 for “sequences of intense violence and action, some disturbing images and brief strong language.”
In the end, the interesting aspect of Vantage Point ends up being its undoing. By the time the resolution is revealed, viewers have been dragged through the same 15 minutes of plot so many times that they probably don’t care much about who or why (the what, where and when are self explanatory, thankfully).
I give Vantage Point 2.5 stars out of 5 stars.