Vantage Point 2008

Let's imagine that you're the producer of a movie set up in Salamanca, but Spain is too far away, and you already spent most of your budget on the actors payroll. What do you do? Easy! Just film in Mexico, it's a nice country, it's closer to Hollywood, and they even speak the same language! To disguise it a little bit, distribute a few Spanish flags amongst the extras, and surely nobody will notice it's not Spain! :)

(For non Spanish speakers: yes, Mexican and Spanish people share the same language... in the same way that somebody from Texas, London, Australia or Hong Kong would share English. Nobody in their right mind would film in Hong Kong, with two hundred local extras, and have them pass for New Yorkers, right? Well that's exactly what they did in this movie).

If they planned to film in Mexico, why didn't they set up the movie in Mexico instead of pretending it's Spain? It makes no difference to the story at all!!

Anyway, moving on. Let's now imagine you're the storywriter. You're writing a thriller, a good one, you know, with lots of plot twists and stuff. You're almost done with the script after a lot of hard work (about 7 minutes of writing, give or take). But you just can't wrap it up to make it into a movie... there are too many characters doing too many things at the same time. You could just remove a superfluous character, but they already casted Forest Whitaker and it would be uncool to fire him now. And you don't want to mess it up with multiple scenes on screen either, they already did that with Hulk and it was a huge fail. So what else could you do...? Wait, I have an idea! We can make a 5 minutes movie, but film it from 238 different points of view, and play them one after another, as if we were rewinding!!! Cool, huh? (No, not really...)

On the plus side, that way we can also afford to have Sigourney Weaver and Eduardo Noriega for the whole movie, even if they only have to record like 10 minutes each. Gee, with the money we are saving this way, we actually could have filmed in Spain, after all...

There is nothing salvageable from this movie. The location ambient couldn't be more awful, even if they tried. Compared to this, I could almost forgive what they did on Mission Impossible 2. But sadly, there are even worse problems with Vantage Point. The first 40 minutes are the same scene, over and over again, only switching the character each time: 5 minutes, rewind, and start again. Yes, it gets annoying, of course it does. At least, the second half gets a little... well, I wanted to say that it gets better, but it's actually the other way around. Slightly less rewinds, but the story gets much dumber. So... yeah.

By the way, I have another gem for you. Let's imagine that now you are a 5 years old, sweet little girl, who wants to cross a highway with loooots of traffic. There is a pedestrian bridge over it, but you're 5... so, you try to cross the road instead, like the proverbial chicken. First attempt: woah, close one, you almost got run over! Never mind, you try again, because you really want to cross. Second attempt: yup, almost run over. But you try again anyway! Third attempt, and there is an ambulance going straight towards you at 800 km/h (or mph, whatever), with the flashing lights, the sirens, the whole thing. Quick, what do you do!? Move out of the way? Nah, better to stay still, crying for mom in slow motion. Luckily Forest Whitaker was around, and had time to notice what was happening, climb down the bridge, run to the girl, and save her, before anybody else even noticed anything. Superman Whitaker!! And here I was, calling his character superfluous... :)