VANTAGE POINT

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Assassination Anxiety

The Political Thriller Returns With a Vengeance

Director Pete Travis ("Omagh") turns debut screenwriter Barry Levy’s Rashomon-inspired script, about an assassination attempt against a U.S. president on a visit to Salamanca, into a dizzyingly complex puzzle that sits comfortably next to such great political thrillers as "In the Line of Fire" (1992).

The ever-reliable Dennis Quaid elevates his leading man status as Thomas Barnes, a Secret Service body guard returning to duty for the first time since taking a bullet for President Ashton (William Hurt) a year earlier. There’s more than a little relevance in the story’s Spanish setting where the President arrives for a summit regarding the global war on terror.

At noon, rifle shots penetrate the President’s chest as he takes the podium in a public square where an American news team captures the shocking scene. Seconds later, a bomb blast reduces the area to body parts and rubble. The clock continually returns to noon at ten-minute intervals, allowing the audience to observe the circumstances from various viewpoints. A suspect, an American tourist, a terrorist, and the President himself provide the alternating vantage points. The timed cinematic device works like a charm.

We’re introduced to the characters’ varying personalities in the context of the two sudden eruptions of violence. The President goes down, Barnes sees a man run on stage. He stops him with football tackle that flattens the suspect. Howard Lewis (Forest Whitaker), a lone American tourist, searches the scene with a video camera that captures a more subjective version than the one being blasted across airwaves by TV news producer Rex Brooks (Sigourney Weaver) from the relative comfort of her trailer. Barnes and his partner Kent (Matthew Fox) go back a long way together. Their interactions become a homing beacon for the film’s chiaroscuro study of internal motivation versus external attempts at fulfilling allegiances of duty.

Everything about "Vantage Point" is unexpected. The way the film indirectly yet directly addresses terrorism, betrayal, and politics is unconventional. Plenty is left to the imagination. When the camera shifts from ground level close-up views to distant aerial positions, we’re drawn to the place and characters in a personal and contemplative way. And there are chase sequences – not just any chase scenes, but chases that invade your heart and your throat.

Before becoming a filmmaker, the Manchester-born Peter Travis worked his way through film school as a motorcycle courier. You can see his low and fast perspective in chase sequences that will take your breath away.

Peter Travis has created a new kind of American action film that feels European in the same way William Friedkin’s "French Connection" did. Travis makes an all- inclusive association between cultures without stressing the issue. All agendas are personal, and every character commits with utter devotion.

The movie sweats out its story. We gravitate to Dennis Quaid’s character to cuss and fight on our behalf. "Vantage Point" is the first great action thriller of the year, and the first great political thriller in a long while.

Rated PG-13. 90 mins.