As far as convincing kick-ass US presidents go, William Hurt has to rank towards the bottom of the list. I’ll chose Harrison Ford any day over Hurt whose physiognomy seems better suited to Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) type roles. Yet, Pete Travis, the director of the wasted effort Vantage Point, has no qualms about showing us Hurt, as the US president, getting into some kind of fistfight with the terrorists who kidnapped him.

Vantage Point starts intelligently enough, with the attempted assassination of the US president during a speech in Spain, being shown from different points of view. Every 10 minutes or so, we are offered a new perspective on the events, through the eyes of a new character. And each time, we seem to be getting closer to finding out what really happened. Except that after slowly raising the tension and having us fairly attentive, Travis decides, mysteriously and shamefully, to throw it all away and to turn his film into some kind of ridiculous over the top action flick. And to make things worse, Travis has the audacity to still pretend that it is intelligent by merging all the different stories into a silly denouement that reminded me of the terrible Crash (2004) in its mediocrity and pretentiousness. Rashomon (1950), this film isn’t.
Imagine a scene where for ten minutes we follow a little girl as she runs looking for her mother, and we can feel from the selection of shots and from the editing that the director is leading her towards a busy road with lots of incoming traffic. At that point, the only thought that logically must enter our mind is: no, the director cannot possibly be aiming for such a cliché scene. Something new and unexpected is going to happen, right? Well, no. Travis does indeed lead the little girl to a busy road in the middle of which she suddenly freezes and stays there screaming, waiting for a car to hit her. Didn’t Travis watch Austin Powers (1997)? Didn’t he get Mike Myers’s joke as Austin Power spends several minutes warning some guy that he is about to run him over with a bulldozer?

As I recently did with Jumper (2008), I will still manage to extract something interesting from this film. Aside for the MTV style shooting and editing, and terrorism aside, Vantage Point does capture a very relevant aspect of our lives. In the film, each character seems to be encountering a different reality, not only based on his or her direct sensory experience but also through their use of technology. Mobile phones and video cameras play an important role in the film as they help to assemble the various pieces of the puzzle. Yet, each version of the reality they convey is incomplete and misleading. Technology has the power to show us images that constitute only one type of reality. The question that is increasingly pertinent today is: what makes one’s reality any less significant than that of someone else? We live in a society where everyone now has the ability to be a witness and to create their own reality out of the different pieces they chose to select.

In addition, in Vantage Point, the mobile phone is used by both the terrorists to organize and implement their plan (a smartphone is used, among other things, to remotely control and trigger the riffle that is used against the president) and by the authorities to locate the terrorists and to avert their plot. This seemed particularly significant as several recent headlines have discussed terrorism and the use of mobile phones.
So, if anything else, Vantage Point does at least offer us a little something to think about in terms of how technology is affecting our lives.