Even though I'm a staunch agnostic, I've made Sunday my day of rest, in honor of my body being old and me generally being on my feet a lot between Thursday and Saturday. I've been starting my mornings with a jaunt to the local Whole Foods to get a morning roll and a little bit of a walk to get the blood flowing through my legs. Other than that, I've been trying to catch up on my movie viewing. The good thing about taking a long hiatus from seeing movies, is that you've got a nice line-up of films waiting to be seen. Juno and Atonement didn't disappoint, but I'd missed the local showings of No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood, so pickings were slim this last weekend. The best of a bad bunch seemed to be Vantage Point. (Spoilers after the jump.)
It wasn't the worst movie I've ever seen. In fact, the beginning was quite promising, and they managed to deal with some politically sensitive topics fairly well, not coming down on any one side or taking any obvious swipes at any viewpoint. Then, unfortunately, they decided to try and make the plot really complicated with some major twists. At this point, I almost think that The Usual Suspects did us all a disservice by being so well done, since so many movies have tried to have complicated plot lines, and almost all of them have failed, some worse than others. Vantage Point managed to avoid any obvious plot holes, at least tying to rationalize everything, but some major plot points near the end hinged on some characters acting, well, out of character from the way they'd been acting the whole time. I'm not sure why the terrorist mastermind, who has set off two bombs in heavily populated areas and shoots multiple people suddenly doesn't want to hit a little girl with his van (I'm not kidding, that's how he gets caught. He crashes the van instead of hitting a little girl, allowing Dennis Quaid to catch up and shoot him.)
Then there's the Double Agent, (Matthew Fox's character.) One of the big twists is that he's on the terrorists (who appear to be Spanish Muslims, perhaps still angry over that whole Charles Martel thing) side, but they never really give a reason how and why one of the top Secret Service agents is a terrorist. He mentions being 'sick of the double life,' which to me implies him having gone into the Secret Service as a terrorist, even though Matthew Fox is about as Spanish as I am. Plus, I'm just guessing that they screen for that sort of thing when they're doing Secret Service interviews.
So, in the end, the movie disappoints because it's trying too hard to be complex. I'd like to say that it's a noble effort, but it seems like they got to the end and couldn't figure out how to stop their own bad guys without an act of god, which is never a good thing (it's OK in Stargate SG-1, but not in a movie...)
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