Vantage Point; Good idea, poorly executed.

It’s 1:50 and we haven’t even taken lunch yet. The mood of the office gets a little bit edgy when this is the case. As my hunger grows, Mike again mentions that the movie “Vantage Point” opened today and there’s a 2:10. After being reminded of this fact, I cave at the last minute. “Okay, let’s go right now, because I need to sneak food in, and I hate missing previews.” We jump in the car and within minutes we are sitting in the theater, eating Quiznos and watching this movie that I have been interested in for far too long. They started showing trailers for this movie during the summer, when it was intended to have an October release. For some reason, it was pushed back to a late February release. Now this is not a good sign.

Studios don’t hold a movie back because it’s looks great and they want to have movie goers wait a few months. Generally they hold back because the test screenings have not gone well and they need to do some tweaking. With Vantage point it is clear that their tweaking did not redeem this movie. As I sat in the theater, enjoying my sandwich, I found the dialogue with Sigourney Weaver had a very cheesy, poorly directed vibe. It was more Lifetime TV movie, then Blockbuster Hollywood Film. Unfortunately this direction plagued all of the other actors.

The gimmick of the movie is that you learn the story from different points of view. I think this idea can work great when the film is good. When the film is bad, it is annoying and gains collective sighs from the audience. It is a good idea but poorly executed. It really comes of the rails at the end of the movie. It becomes campy and unbelievable. Everything was working in this films favor, good preview, good stars, great non-linear story telling format… but it fell flat and the plot twists were not good enough to redeem this bad film.

I have to put this film in the category of “Rent it only if your significant other really wants to see it and you love them and want to make them happy and not always pick the film you want.” This is a very narrow category because this is really not a good film. Save the rental, put something else in the queue, avoid Vantage Point.