vantage point: don't, for the love of god, see this movie

I made the mistake; you don't have to. Anyway, don't pay them anything if you do. If we keep giving them money for crap, crap is what they'll keep casting our way until we forget that we smell bad and start thinking it's normal.

This is one of those Convergence Films which have been so popular in recent years. As far as I can tell the trend was begun by the King of Convergence, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel) and picked up with some fervor by others. Crash is one such (the bad one, not the Cronenberg), a few Soderbergh films, also Emilio Estevez's Bobby and (I suspect; I haven't seen it) Anthony Minghella's widely-ignored Breaking and Entering. A Convergence Film follows the parallel development of several characters (or, in some cases which shall remain nameless for a few more scowling paragraphs, parallel NON-development of several THOUSANDS of NON-characters)whose fates are entwined momentarily by an impersonal occurence, generally an act of violence or a terrible accident.

I think we can blame the Brokeback Mountain crowd for this shameful betrayal of the art of movie-making. My theory is that if the gay cowboy folks hadn't been so self-righteous and vocal about how unquestionably their film deserved the Oscar (small matter if they were right; there's a certain decorum to be observed. You crow AFTER you win it, not before), then the Academy would have GIVEN it to them instead of taking umbrage and handing the statue to Crash, which was the tragedy that stole Convergence from the able hands of Mr. Inarritu and convinced the rest of the world that it was a good idea to give it a go. And it's not a good idea, not at all. Convergence Films are hard going, demanding imagination, a subtle touch, a strong intellect, a great editor, and a keenly-honed sensitivity to the delicately-shifting shades of strength and weakness which compose a human being. A well-done Convergence Film is primarily an exploration of character, not action.

But none of this has anything to do with the subject at hand, except in the relationship that an untouched target has with the arrow that misses it entirely. Vantage Point is a clodhopping, humorless mess built like a staggering house of cards out of long chains of absurd coincidences and held together with a mephitic glue of bombastic self-importance.

(At this point, I ought to give you a *SPOILER ALERT*, but I'm not going to, because there's nothing about his movie that can be spoiled. It's already rotten; it's vulture-grub; carrion-eaters only need apply.)

Nothing in this movie bears any relation whatsoever to the real world. No fault in that, unless your filmmaker is pretending that it is the real world, as this lousy filmmaker is. In a panicking crowd of hundreds, The Nice Guy (Forest Whitaker) with his little personal camera somehow manages to film every important incident happening in the huge plaza where an assassination attempt occurs. Mr. Big Terrorist Guy (Said Taghmaoui) carries a cellphone with which he can, with the push of a button from the back of a crowd, remotely aim and fire a rifle through a distant window which hits his target square in the chest. I suspect he bought it on the set of a Harry Potter film, since it is obviously a magical device, and can probably make a pastrami sandwich and do the dishes simultaneously. After killing hundreds in cold blood, from both distance and close quarters, he relinquishes success in the last moment to avoid running over a little girl in the street. (Only she's not really a little girl: she's a Plot Device disguised as a character. They all are.) Note to bad filmmakers everywhere: if you're going to make me swallow a foul-tasting plot-twist like that, you'd better damn well set it up firmly with major Bad-Guy's-a-Sucker-for-Little-Kids scenes early on.

But wait! There's more. Mr. Head-of-the-President's-Security-Team (Matthew Fox) turns out to be one of the dreadful terrorists, although it is never explained why he's up for killing the president or, indeed, how he climbed into his position of importance without ever having had a damn security check run on his treacherous ass. Even the little things are wrong: in the television production booth where we start out (I call it The Clumsy Exposition Module), Ms. Director (Sigourney Weaver) argues with Ms Prettyface Newscaster (Zoe Saldana) who has gone off-script with a tirade of her own devising. In the real world, that newscaster would be out on the street without a job. In this world, it's treated like a minor peccadillo. No matter, since the newscaster will be dead within a few moments. We know that because we can watch it from the booth, the discarded camera having very thoughtfully fallen so that it still films her gracefully prone body.

Crap. It makes me grumpy, just talking about it. Point is, it was written by someone who learned what the real world is not by living in it but by watching fair-to-middlin' episodes of "24". Except... wait! I forgot... It WASN'T written, not at all. It's a 12-page treatment that someone forgot to write a script for because they were too busy throwing money at it. This is how I figure it happened: they've got the director, they've got Quaid and Hurt, they've signed the international stars to give it faux-Inarritu credibility (the lovely and talented Eduardo Noriega, for one: utterly wasted), the caterers are hired, when some assistant coffee-pourer goes, "Hey, should we have a script?" For her pains, she's sent out to the picket-lines to scare up some poor schlub whose pre-strike job was probably polishing commas and apostrophes for a third-tier forensics show, a fellow who hasn't eaten for a few weeks. He punches out four or five pages of non-dialogue to stick in between explosions and car-chases, and voila! We have a non-film with which we can wring good money out of idiots like me who think, "Ah, what the hell, I'll give it a go. How bad can it be?"