Vantage Point (2008)
Sony Pictures DVD (region 4)
d. Pete Travis; pr. Neal H. Moritz; ph. Amir M. Mokri; m. Atli Orvarsson; ed. Stuart Baird, Sigvaldi J. Karason; scr. Barry Levy; cast. Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, Forest Whitaker, Bruce McGill, Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt (90 mins)
The opening to Vantage Point establishes a contemporary political context of post 9-11 international anti-Americanism. At a media event in Spain which the reporter begins by comparing to terrorism statistics post 9-11, the President of the USA drives by protestors accusing him of terrorism. Media head Sigourney Weaver cares only for the story of the president, telling her camera people to stay away from the protestors (unless they set themselves on fire). The cameras record the president’s assassination by gunshot and subsequent bomb explosion: now to solve what’s been seen as the latest act of (seeming) political terrorism. A lone intelligence agent (Dennis Quaid) follows up on surveillance footage to uncover a larger plot involving a kidnapping conspiracy.
Vantage Point is a clever variation on intertwining stories in director Quentin Tarantino’s work, transferring it to the age of digital video surveillance and political terror reminiscent of the political thrillers of director Tony Scott in such as Spy Game and Enemy of the State and even of Peter Hyams in Capricorn One. Various perspectives on a single instance – the assassination – are revealed in succession, the story unveiling in the synthesis of details: including the revelation of a Presidential body double. The terrorist threat here is believed to be an act of retaliation for the US prevention of a dirty bomb plot out of Morocco: the tit-for-tat battle of terrorism and counter-terrorism inherited from the Israeli-Palestinian terrorists. The CIA wants the President to order an action against a friendly Arab nation for harbouring terrorism.
Vantage Point is an accomplished thriller which moves at a dynamic pace even if in its final moments it stretches credibility. Nevertheless, it suggests a post 9-11 world of constant terrorist-based one-upmanship. Significantly, ideology is irrelevant and the emphasis here is on the sheer professionalism of the terrorists in their enterprise and, once again in terrorist films post 9-11, the American unprepared-ness for such action. However, the emphasis on the lone rugged hero – the intelligence agent played by Dennis Quaid – the film resorts to the cowboy to the rescue mentality of B-movie reactionary fantasies. Although the film is a gripping thriller, it merely updates existing terrorist characterizations and scenarios with the climate of post 9-11 anti-Americanism being all the justification needed for the presumption of a terrorist agenda existing wherever the US may make its presence felt internationally. One interesting thing about Vantage Point is that by now in the cinema of terrorism as a subgenre post 9-11, the “war on terror” is an assumed ideological background and increasing expositionary shorthand – just how this “war” may be dramatized is the challenge embraced by Vantage Point although it never becomes truly allegorical.
The lead terrorist figure here says American arrogance is such that it cannot foresee any possibility in which it is not one step ahead and is therefore blinded to political reality in the war on terror. When two rivals confront each other, one says “this war will never end”: as a post 9-11 action thriller Vantage Point takes as its core rationale the premise that the tit-for-tat exchange between terrorists and the US set in motion by 9-11 and comprising the War on Terror is permanent. In that assertion, it is a bleak film and exists primarily for the cleverness of its captivating execution.
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