Rashomon x 2 plus rewind. That, in a nutshell, is the conceit behind Vantage Point, a Hollywood blockbuster that weaves together the points of view of eight individuals – double the number in Akira Kurosawa’s masterful depiction of how eyewitness accounts of the same incident can greatly vary. Also, rather than centring on a single incident, Pete Travis’ film follows a series of events, a couple of the more attention-getting of which are recorded and broadcast live on TV to millions of people from the Spanish city of Salamanca’s magnificent Plaza Mayor.

“Good morning, America” are the first words heard in Vantage Point. Those words by a TV news commentator lead to the first viewpoint this film’s audience is given: that of those controlling the cameras – notably producer Rex Brooks (Sigourney Weaver) – and the attendant coverage of a landmark international anti-terrorism summit that has brought the USA’s President Ashton (William Hurt) to sunny Spain. It being an American TV company, the focus is on the American head of state and his entourage, including Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid), a secret service agent back on duty for the first time after being shot while successfully foiling a previous presidential assassination attempt.

This time around though, it doesn’t look like Barnes and his fellow agents (who include his younger superior, Kent Taylor (Matthew Fox)) are able to do all that much to prevent President Ashton from being shot in front of the eyes of the world. At least, not initially. But, as Vantage Point goes on to show, and more than once, there is quite a bit more going on than meets any one pair of eyes – including even those aided by technical devices like the camcorder expertly wielded by Howard Lewis (Forest Whitaker), ostensibly just an average American tourist in the crowd at the Plaza Mayor that day but someone who struck this non-American as too suspiciously willing to be a part of the ensuing proceedings and too capable of heroics to be a genuinely regular guy.

Compared to Lewis as well as pretty much everybody else, however, Barnes comes across not only as superhuman but android-like even. For while his character is first seen debating whether to take medication to prevent the jitters before resuming his duties, this is one relentless man in pursuing the bad guys and protecting the president of the United States. And also someone very hard to destroy. (As it so happens, the sight of Barnes miraculously emerging relatively undamaged from a badly wrecked car may well have been the moment the limits of credibility were reached for me.)

At the end of the day, stuff like this ensures that, for all of the movie’s director being Irish and its whole story taking place on non-American soil, it is hard to see Vantage Point as targeting anyone other than patriotic Americans enamoured of American heroics. Still, even they might find their patience tried by such repeated rewinding and revisiting of incidents that result in “11:59am” getting flashed more than once on the screen; occurences that, at the viewing I attended, provoked increasing amounts of derisive-sounding laughter the further we got into this initially clever but ultimately disappointingly conventional action movie.

Yvonne Teh