Repetitive 'Point'

The always likable Dennis Quaid headlines all the advertising for “Vantage Point,” but the movie has so many different and parallel story lines that he’s only the focus for about 20 minutes of the movie.
It’s no secret that in the film the president is assassinated. The commercials lead you to presume that Quaid and the audience will be putting together a puzzle of how the shooting happened and who was involved. Instead, we’re given about seven different story lines that don’t always interconnect.
Quaid plays Thomas Barnes, a Secret Service agent who only six months ago took a bullet for the president (played by William Hurt). Matthew Fox, and a number of supporting players including Forest Whitaker, Sigourney Weaver and Edgar Ramirez, also get their fair shares of (read: too much) attention.
No one likes to watch the same thing over and over again, and rather than give new information about characters or plot, the filmmakers give viewers increasingly annoying flashbacks prior to the shooting. Right after the hysteria surrounding the assassination, the first flashback works extremely well, giving the viewer some important background information, as well as high tension now that we know what’s about to happen. Unfortunately, the gimmick quickly wears thin. In fact, the audience I sat with laughed at the ridiculousness of the flashbacks each time they occurred.
But the movie’s obvious flaws do not completely ruin it. The story is compelling and exciting, forcing the viewer to pay absolute attention so as not to miss a key twist. The beginning and end (where no flashbacks are used) are tense and captivating and worth the price of admission. But so many new developments and twists arise in the middle of the movie, with no one seeming to be who they are, that one starts to think 7-year-old Anna might be in on it.
“Vantage Point” is the cousin of “In the Line of Fire,” “Patriot Games” and “The Manchurian Candidate,” and although it may not necessarily be the ugly cousin, it’s not nearly as pretty.