Vantage Point

Vantage Point is about as smooth, fast-moving and enjoyable an action thriller as you're likely to see this year.

An overplotted, gimmicky presidential-assassination thriller, its interlocking pieces have to fit just so for it to stay coherent and ratchet up the tension.

Vantage Point is flat-out one of the more exciting and original gut-busters that Hollywood has produced in many a month.

Vantage Point is three-fourths of a terrific thriller, which in this dreary run of winter movies seemed like clear spring water to this parched traveler.

Vantage Point starts from a position of strength only to race through the streets of Salamanca, Spain, toward a foregone conclusion.

As a refreshing change of pace from other action films of its ilk, Vantage Point packs a wallop with its clever staging.

Ninety percent of the movie is utterly effective, though I will admit to laughing for all the wrong reasons at Matthew Fox's character arc. Good actor meets ill-fitting role.

If someone remade Rashomon with Bourne sensibilities, it might look something like Vantage Point.

Though more attached to their narrative gimmick than their characters, the filmmakers hook us and reel us in during 90 breathless minutes.

Irish director Pete Travis successfully creates excitement.

Vantage Point is exciting, thrilling and gripping... and a little disappointing.

Vantage Point is a nifty idea for a thriller -- and it's a nifty thriller, too, until it all goes silly in the last half-hour.

The movie's structure is clever -- the same story, successively told from eight angles.

Grounding the inventively structured story in a degree of human reality keeps it from spiraling into jump-cut frenzy. While it's no classic, Vantage Point is well worth a look.

The tricky structure of Vantage Point is like a girdle -- it can move around and, in some cases, hide the flaws, but the flaws are still there.

Despite the high-speed auto chase, the bombs going off, the bullets flying and the terrorists skulking about, Vantage Point can best be described as the Groundhog Day of thrillers.

Dumbed down and hyped up, Vantage Point is less a failed experiment than a simplistic gloss on Islamofascist peril.

The best thing about Vantage Point may be that it is set in the red-tiled, Gothic city of Salamanca, Spain (actually Mexico City).

A slick and exciting film about the shooting of a U.S. president that's far more interesting when it's playing with time and perspective than it is when it deals with politics or simple human truths.

A competently-made action-thriller with some clever ideas, but nothing particularly ground-breaking once it casually discards its pretense of being told from multiple points of view.

What happens when a conventional thriller is broken into pieces? You get Vantage Point, a movie as frustrating as it is intriguing.

A fast-paced thriller whose gimmicky narrative helps disguise the foolishness at its center.

Vantage Point, a movie about a presidential assassination plot that is told from several different viewpoints, turns out to be a decent thriller in the vein of Clint Eastwood's In the Line of Fire.

Often with such gimmick films it's impossible not to wonder if they would have played better straight-up, without all the hoopla. In the case of Vantage Point, the answer is decidedly yes.

Vantage Point has a gripping premise that, for a while, at least, is grippingly executed.

The dialogue is ridiculous, the assassination plot absurdly is indiscreet and the chatter about terrorism and foreign policy is clumsily disguised filmmaker grandstanding.

Vantage Point's high-octane premise and solid cast help compensate for its structural shortcomings.

Vantage Point is a lightweight action thriller. Entertaining. Easy on the brain. Forgettable.

There's a cool car chase and a couple of twists that make Vantage Point fun, if not exactly good.

No matter how nobly or ambitiously anyone (including the filmmakers) may try to describe the new thriller Vantage Point, the multiple-perspective film is far more Groundhog Day than Rashomon.

Well, here's another ordinary action flick that looked considerably more interesting in its coming attractions preview.

Ultimately too focused on appealing to the lowest common denominator to even approach being an art film.

Political thrillers don't get much more craven and shallow than Vantage Point, a gimmicky Rashomon-like take on an assassination, unfolding from multiple perspectives.

An overly gimmicky and fatally repetitive terrorist thriller that quickly wears out its welcome.

With a less pedigreed international cast the whole thing would be a disaster, as opposed to a chilly new kind of disaster film.

The action thriller Vantage Point has a terrific trailer but the movie itself turns out to be a feature-length trailer. It's all coming attractions for a film that never really happens.

Vantage Point, a big-budget studio production that might just as well have been a direct-to-DVD release starring Jean-Claude Van Damme.

With a plot so knotty and twisted that pretzel makers would worship it, Vantage Point promises much more than it can ever rationally deliver.

Vantage Point is very much a surface film, falling back time and again on hysteria, familiar paranoia, maudlin heroics and opportune happenstance.

Most people who see Vantage Point will likely only seek mindless fun, and the brisk, efficient action might make up for everything if the movie weren’t so easy to mock.

Vantage Point is the highlights reel of an action movie too average to watch in any other form.

An assassination thriller that boasts the glossy tourist vistas of an airline magazine combined with a serious case of instant-replay-itis.

For all its whiz-bang technique and unabashed love for the Rashomon storytelling device, the boilerplate political intrigue of Vantage Point generates only mild shocks.

If the makers of Vantage Point merely set out to create a tense moviegoing experience, they certainly succeeded.

Vantage Point is a thriller that has quite a lot on its mind. The very structure of the movie challenges the audience’s patience, if not its wit.

Vantage Point is a mishmash of ideas and action, all jostling around in a jittery jumble.

At a certain point, it's sheer can-you-top-this excess, and when credibility flies out the window there's no reason to continue paying attention.

Audiences would probably find it more entertaining and stimulating to watch a rerun of TV's 24.

Vantage Point reduces global terrorism to a Rubik's Cube suitable for an evening's entertainment. If that doesn't make you vaguely ill, by all means take this thriller for the shallow, gimmicky "ride" it aspires to be

Vantage Point uses several of them, as it tries to make some sense of a plot that does not make any sense whatsoever.

Maybe it's meant to set up a sequel in which eight different producers, screenwriters and studio execs hash out the mysterious box-office death of this movie -- and the motive of the critics who assassinated it.

For about half an hour, before the movie crashes and burns in a bonfire of exaggeration and stupidity overkill, Vantage Point shapes up as a nifty ride.

The audience waits and waits for the dreaded flashbacks to end, and then, finally, when the movie gets past showing the same 20 or 30 minutes over and over, there's nothing of compelling interest to see.

Vantage Point is yet another case of fractured narrative storytelling in service of a story that would be shamelessly cliché and obvious if it were told in linear sequence.

Toward the end, the accumulation of cliché and numbskullery is so preposterous it makes Vantage Point pretty entertaining.

If you can work your way past Vantage Point's goofy casting that places a bland, blank-eyed William Hurt in the White House, then I suppose you can manage to forgive this Rashomon rip-off's other glaring idiosyncrasies, of which there are many.

The first 15 minutes of Vantage Point are the worst. Then you only have to sit through them seven more times.

Vantage Point offers us a bizarre spectacle: the action flick as pseudo-cubist experiment, replaying one fateful 15-minute stretch encompassing the apparent assassination of the American President from a panoply of POVs.