Wired Cola

So with the kitchen in the throes of a repaint and everything that was in the kitchen scattered around the rest of the house to make room for the painting, it was imperative that TLO and I took the dog and got out of the house for a few hours.

That left us at the White Spot's delightfully anachronistic car hop service for dinner, where our dog scared the heck out of our server by speaking up when she came to get the order. I recommend the cannelloni from their Tuscan menu.

Then we rolled out to the drive-in to watch the early movie, Vantage Point, which I will gratuitously spoil starting in a paragraph or so, so if you want to see it later, simply accept my judgment that it is a thriller that is half-clever but not great, then go read something else while I tell the movie's story for it.

Plot synopsis: you see an attempt on the president's life repeatedly from the viewpoints of several different characters. You may now refer to this as "Rashomon-like" in much the same way as certain foodstuffs are chocolatey. Hijinks, which is to say mass murder and mayhem, ensue.

Before I talk about this movie's unusual structure, I think I should mention the casting. You've got your Dennis Quaid, your William Hurt, your Sigourney Weaver, and your Forrest Whitaker. What's the cast billing? Quaid, Matthew Fox, Whitaker, and then a bunch of people you've never heard of. Weaver's character essentially owns the first 10-15 minutes of screen time, and is hardly seen after that. Hurt plays the president, and is in much of the film, but is clearly not the star.

Quaid is obviously the star, Whitaker's character has a weirdly peripheral role as the observer, and Matthew Fox is the lead bad guy, though several of his interchangeable (seriously, at one point I lost track—among three interchangeable bad guys—of which one was the ringleader, which one was acting against his will to save his brother, and which one was the other guy) co-conspirators get at least as much screen time.

I like this! The diffuse distribution of screen time usefully deceives the viewer as to the ultimate structure of this violent whodunit, which is a nice trick.

Now back to that structure: hardly unique (see Rashomon et al), but unusual, and cleverly constructed here, though not as cleverly as the film thinks. After spending roughly half of the film playing through various character's viewpoints one at a time, the scenes becomes a little more linear and the viewpoint is much less tied to any one character. This nicely reflects the structure of the plot, as each character has very little knowledge or interaction at the start of the film, and by the end everything (characters and plot threads) come together, as you might expect.

That, some reasonably competent acting and dialogue, and pretty much perfect (as they should be these days) special effects are the good of the film. The plot pulls together with some semblance of competence, and the film ends with a long car chase sequence that would be great in a world that had never known Frankenheimer. Fortunately, we live in the latter world, and therefore the car chase sequence is mediocre.

The bad? The acting and dialogue are merely competent at best, ham-fisted at bad, and arguably moronic at worst. The plotting, when given any thought whatsoever, is inarguably moronic. It isn't so much that this film features an idiot plot as that it features an over-complicated plot by the evil-doers which is thwarted more or less by chance. For the sake of allowing the film's plot to work, the security procedures of the Secret Service are essentially assumed to be somewhere between fragile and insanely negligent, and the existence of presidential doubles good enough to appear in a free-form public engagement is presumed. This last item is simultaneously really ridiculous and essentially acceptable: it beggars reason, but it is a premise the movie hangs on, and I'll let almost any film have one free plot premise.

Too bad about the many other dumb moments!

Just to run down a few quickies:

-the bad guys manage to infiltrate a sniper rifle and an elaborate remote-firing rig into a presumed-secure area. If they could get all that hardcore and expensive technology in place, couldn't they have just as easily have planted a sniper? The justification for this kill-o-matic setup (which later needs to be retrieved by a bad guy) is too risible to mention.

-The bad guys have access to a bad-ass special forces (nation unspecified, presumably Spain) dude who manages to sequentially kill something like six Secret Service agents all on his own, and does it so quickly and sneakily he does not generate a massive red alert among the surviving presidential bodyguards.

-The astoundingly complicated plot is all leading up to an attempt to kidnap the president. Indeed, the plotters collectively have multiple opportunities to kill the president. Please explain to me how much more a terrorist group could get out of a kidnapped president versus an assassinated one, and how that was worth roughly a two-magnitude increase in the difficulty of the plot? Heck, the story already presumes that one of the Secret Service agents are compromised; he could have just greeted the president one morning, capped him with his service revolver, and end of story. Or he could have let the designated suicide bomber member of the group get within blow-uppy distance of the president while serving him breakfast or something. It's bad when your supposedly-serious plot reminds me of the words of Scott Evil: "I have a gun, in my room..."

-The deaths of dozens if not hundreds of people from two widely-separated bombings and a sniper shooting are apparently easily dismissed with a cover story that they were the work of a lone assassin.

After all that, the movie seems pretty incoherent. It's not so bad that I'm rooting for the president to die by the end, but on the other hand please note that the "triumphant" ending sees our hero rescue the president, and most of the other "good" characters we have met (okay, Forest Whitaker and the 10-year-old girl) survive. Dear "Vantage Point" Secret Service: please explain the hundreds (if not thousands) of innocents and executive-branch personnel (ranging from Secret Service agents to key POTUS advisers) who got killed by the bad guys. It's bad when your supposedly-serious film's ending reminds me of the (admittedly even stupider) finale of Stone Cold. I once composed a list of 103 hitman comedies, maybe I should follow up with a list of nihilst action movies.

So as long as you don't think about Vantage Point, it's pretty good! I actually enjoyed the chase sequences and something about the drive-in makes any movie more tolerable than it might be in other venues, but ultimately it's a damnably dumb movie.