Vantage Point: Critic Reviews

The director, Pete Travis, is a pulse-pounding technological showman whose high-strung, quick-cut style might be described as JFK meets Paul Greengrass meets Jerry Bruckheimer. That said, it's not the plot that thickens -- it's the pulp.

A gimmick in search of its own point.

While the title, trailer and commercials imply that we'll be carefully piecing together clues to a complex assassination attempt as seen from several perspectives, the final product turns out to be a tepid thriller that promises more than it delivers.

The question regarding Vantage Point is how this thriller with the Groundhog Day fixation was allowed to meander out of Columbia Pictures so overloaded with bad acting.

Reduces global terrorism to a Rubik's Cube suitable for an evening's entertainment. If that doesn't make you vaguely ill, by all means take this thriller for the shallow, gimmicky "ride" it aspires to be.

What is the real crime? Why, beating the audience about the ears, eyes and brain with essentially the same sequence of events from eight characters' points of view, none of which adds much more than deafening hysteria and identically dreadful music.

A nice, straightforward, good old-fashioned geopolitical conspiracy thriller with no pretentions.

Vantage Point makes nice use of the heft of Dennis Quaid, Forest Whitaker, William Hurt and Sigourney Weaver in a story in which an assassination followed by an explosion gets revisited from eight points of view.

Is it art? Not remotely. But, up to the final scenes, it's a tremendous piece of engineering. And the hurtling force of Vantage Point is fun to watch.

The information sorting and gathering required by Barry L. Levy's screenplay feels like night school as opposed to a great night out at the movies.

If you're up for good nihilist entertainment, look no further.

The filmmakers hook us and reel us in during 90 breathless minutes.

While it's no classic, Vantage Point is well worth a look.

You can watch a Bugs Bunny cartoon from 10 different angles, and it's still a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Vantage Point is a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

The problem with Vantage Point, or at least one problem, is that it depends too much on coincidence. The film relies on things breaking a certain way for nearly every plot advancement.

The sense of deja vu I had watching so many runaway vehicles crashing and smashing through the narrow cobblestone Spanish streets only reminded me how much more fun I've had watching the running of the bulls in Pamplona.

A 23-minute movie dragged out, via some narrative gimmickry, to a punishing hour and a half.

Chugging forward and chundering back, the movie keeps promising to whip up something hellishly complicated, but what keeps the movie going for an hour and a half is not a complicated plot but a stingy way of dribbling out information.

An overplotted, gimmicky presidential-assassination thriller, its interlocking pieces have to fit just so for it to stay coherent and ratchet up the tension.

Vantage Point is a thriller that has quite a lot on its mind. The very structure of the movie challenges the audience's patience, if not its wit.

The problem with Vantage Point is that the rapid-rewind technique keeps interfering with the thriller's momentum.

Vantage Point offers a modicum of entertainment but it requires viewers to react more forcefully from the gut than the mind. It's viscerally effective but lobotomized.

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

The assassination thriller Vantage Point might have been a triumph of form over content, technique over substance, if only there were anything worthy about its form or technique.

Initially intriguing and energetic, this film ends up demonstrating that a good script needs to be more than a clever concept and fine direction must be more than moving things fast.