Vantage Point

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.

This is competent if completely impersonal filmmaking of a familiar type that finds the usual allotment of famous, or at least famous enough, actors.

A one-trick cinematic gimmick whose sleight of hand fails to disguise its shortcomings, this big-budget, big-name thriller is little more than a long and frustrating prelude to an unremarkable car chase.

Straight out of the slice-and-dice school of filmmaking, Vantage Point fractures chronology and perspective in a vain attempt to disguise its flimsiness.

Some okay thrills with good performances and some smarts. But the last reel plunge spoils things. Myth for the new millennium: any average, out-of-shape middle-aged Yank, including the President, can get in a punch-up with a few well-armed, super-trained terrorists, and win.

Loaded with cliches, but there's enough action and unexpected twists to keep you interested for an hour and a half - if you can stand the Groundhog Day elements.

Vantage Point is an average thriller built on a neat gimmick. The idea is this: We see US president William Hurt assassinated at a Spanish summit. In fact, we see it happen eight times, from different eight points of view. So, we get Sigourney Weaver's TV news producer trying to cover the story, Dennis Quaid's secret service man searching for the shooter, Forest Whittaker's tourist filming the whole thing on his camcorder, and so on. Gradually, these frayed threads cohere into an extremely implausible whodunit.