MOVIE REVIEW: Vantage Point

To look at the TV commercials for "Vantage Point," you'd assume it's a fast-moving thriller and up to a point, you'd be right. It depicts the apparent assassination of the president of the United States at a speech in an outdoor square in Salamanca, the ancient Spanish city. Oscar winner William Hurt is the commander-in-chief, and Dennis Quaid, the lead secret service agent, just back on duty after taking a bullet for the president in an earlier assassination attempt. "Lost" co-star Matthew Fox is another agent on presidential duty.

What follows, however, are six repetitions of the assassination, maybe it's five, or seven, I lost count, I got so bored. Each one ostensibly from a different perspective, and each one depicting subsequent events in the plot. Oscar winner Forest Whittaker costars as a tourist with a Zapruder-like record of the crime he recorded on a camcorder, and before a furious car chase scene ensues, well done, the sequence of improbable events, and things which can only happen in the movies cascade over one another into what winds up as a pretentious mess.

Dennis Quaid does well, and the movie does have an amazing car chase sequence and some shocking violence. But instant changes into conveniently stashed away police uniforms, secret service agents taken out by the half dozen by one gunman, and a sequence of unlikely coincidences make "Vantage Point" preposterous whatever your vantage point.