DVD Extra


Blu-ray offers some ad”vantage” while making this “point”



Matthew Fox, William Hurt and Dennis Quaid in “Vantage Point.” Image courtesy of Sony Pictures.

It’s not easy to pull off a suspenseful thriller, especially one that relies on flashbacks. But while it goes a little flat in places, “Vantage Point” does achieve the desired effect; to keep the viewer guessing.

“Vantage Point” tells the same 15-plus minutes from the point of view of several people; the TV producer (Sigourney Weaver), two Secret Service agents (Dennis Quaid and Matthew Fox), the American tourist (Forest Whitaker), the president (William Hurt), a Spanish cop (Eduardo Noriega) and an assassin (Edgar Ramirez). There’s actually four more, but I don’t want to give away the details.

The scene is a town in Spain. A terrorism summit is about to begin, and the U.S. president is coming up to the dais to make his remarks. Suddenly two shots ring out, and the president collapses. Chaos ensues. The news media is struggling to cover the story, two Secret Service men are trying to find the assassin, the tourist captured it on his video camera, the Spanish cop runs up to protect his mayor and gets tackled by the Secret Service. All of them are experiencing the same event, from different points of view.

If you watch the preview trailer on Apple.com, you find that it gives a lot more clues to the mystery than it should. But there’s still a lot to be said for the direction the script takes to get to the end. In fact, that’s the only thing that I didn’t like about the film; it was a little too neat.

The extras on this disc are rather ordinary; the producers and directors talking about how great the cast is; how it was difficult to show the same 15 minutes and still provide a different point of view each time; the actors talking about how great the director and their fellow actors were.

The most unique extra, available only on Blu-ray, was the “Vantage Viewer GPS tracker.” A pop-up appears at the bottom of the screen, telling you where the eight principal characters are as the 15 minutes progress. It plays that part of the movie in a small left window, while a map of the city shows the location, and the right shows which character is being portrayed. This was actually pretty cool. However, it was a “fixed” feature, in that it popped up when the film’s producers felt it was relevant, not when the viewer wanted to track someone else. In other words, it’s not interactive: you can’t switch to the TV producer while the Secret Service guy is on, and so forth.

I didn’t get the standard two-disc version, so I can’t compare the visual quality between the two discs. The two-disc version does give the viewer the choice between widescreen and full-screen, and offers a digital copy for playback on your PC and Sony’s Playstation Portable (PSP), which means it probably won’t play on your IPod. You can also buy the movie for PSP only, but you won’t get any extras.

I was pleased by the conscious decision by the writers, producers and directors to make this film apolitical. There’s no reference to the nationality of the bad guys or who they represent; nor is the president labeled as Democrat or Republican. And while the trailer gives away an important plot point about him, there’s a twist about it that I didn’t expect and was pleased that they went in that direction.


Bottom line: This is a pretty good thriller, but like most suspense movies, it doesn’t work as well the second time around, now that you know what’s going to happen. The GPS tracker is a neat idea, but it’s not interactive, so it loses points. The three featurettes aren’t that interesting. My recommendation is to purchase the single disc DVD over the two-disc or Blu-ray, unless you’ve got the itch and the cash to spend on them.

Vantage Point

Sony, 123 minutes, PG-13

Single disc DVD: $28.96

Two-disc DVD: $34.95

PSP: $24.94

Blu-ray: $38.96

RottenTomatoes.com reviews

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