Vantage Point Is Goofy But Enjoyable -- and Now Out on DVD

Vantage Point, a goofy yet enjoyable Rashamon-study of the assassination attempt on the United States President (William Hurt) at a peace convention in Spain, is out this week on DVD. We see the scene of the crime (at a town square) repeated from several different perspectives -- from Dennis Quaid, as a secret service agent who once took a bullet for the president; from Forrest Whitaker, playing a tourist with a video camera taping the incident; from Sigourney Weaver, as a TV producer; and a host of others, as the scenario repeats itself endlessly until it begins to come into focus. As the lens clears you see double-dealings, dummy presidents, wily terrorists, not to mention a little girl with an ice cream cone who figures into the nonsense. When it finally gets to a harebrained car chase around the city between Dennis Quaid and a rouge cop, all reason has been thrown to the wind. Director Pete Travis’s film has an annoying Groundhog Day repetition in the beginning, but eventually one kind of gets into all the crackpot coincidences and preposterous plot twists.