Vantage Point

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Unintentional laughs
Rating: 1.5 stars

By PETER KEOUGH

February 20, 2008 1:43:38 PM

VANTAGE POINT: Rashomon it’s not.

For more than half a century, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon has challenged imitators with its unnerving exploration of the unreliability of the individual point of view. The concept would seem a natural for a film about the war on terror, but director Pete Travis instead turns Vantage Point into a version of Groundhog Day with unintentional laughs. The president (William Hurt) is opening a summit on terror in Spain with a big rally. A Secret Service agent (Dennis Quaid) spots some movement in a window across the square. Bang! The president is down. Or is he? Here the film rewinds and reprises the event from the “vantage point” of another character. Over and over. It might have worked had the POVs not blurred together, with each repetition adding only additional preposterous implausibilities. Vantage Point neither resolves its own mysteries nor says much about the Rashomon effect it’s trying to emulate. 90 minutes | Boston Common + Fenway + Fresh Pond + Circle/Chestnut Hill + suburbs

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