Vantage Point

Review in a Hurry:  A presidential assassination attempt is chronicled from eight wildly different points of view, with the heroics of troubled Secret Service agent Dennis Quaid tying it all together. Sounds promising, but be warned: It's long on gimmick, short on subtlety.

The Bigger Picture:  Secret Service agent Thomas Barnes (Quaid) has saved the president once before from a bullet, and his first gig back on active duty is at an antiterror summit in Spain. History repeats itself when President Ashton (William Hurt) is shot, and all hell breaks loose. It's up to Barnes to figure out what the heck's going on, which entails a lot of running around, screaming and reckless driving of a seemingly indestructible European car.

Also witnessing the event is an everyday American dad recording it all on his camera (Forest Whitaker), a news producer (Sigourney Weaver) and a few other are-they-good-or-are-they-evil sorts mingling in the crowd.

The real schtick here is that the witnesses have their own motivations and history, and their individual stories are painstakingly told, one by one, thanks to multiple flashbacks. It's laughably tedious by the third or fourth time, and the use of slow-mo and "rewind" editing, which was really cool about, oh, 20 years ago, is used ad nauseam.

We're not exactly talking art here, but we are talking entertainment. For as many obvious buttons that Vantage Point pushes, there are just as many unforeseen twists and turns, with no wasted airtime in between. Explosions, car chases, flinty-eyed skull duggery—it's all here, and at a rapid pace. It's a big, loud, macho kind of roller-coaster ride that consistently makes for big, loud, macho fun.

The 180—a Second Opinion:  At the end of the day, Vantage Point is also big, loud, dumb macho fun. The dialogue is ridiculous, the assassination plot absurdly is indiscreet and the chatter about terrorism and foreign policy is clumsily disguised filmmaker grandstanding.