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From any perspective, "Vantage Point," starring Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, Forest Whitaker and Sigourney Weaver, is a major disappointment.

From its opening scenes, the movie doesn't make much sense.

The film begins with a news report concerning growing unrest and the
accumulation of discontent with the
arrival of United States President Ashton (William Hurt) in Spain. News reporter Angie Jones (Zoe Saldana) is quickly reined in by station manager Rex Brooks (Weaver). Focus on the real story, Brooks says.

Such an opening doesn't belong in a film focusing on the seemingly opposing, yet equally true, viewpoints of eight strangers.

At a summit to negotiate peace between Spain and the U.S., security nightmares become reality with the attempted assassination of President Ashton. As gunfire from an upstairs balcony rings out, the crowd attending the summit erupts into chaos, and with it, the entire film.

Showing viewers relatively the same events from several points of view, the different vantage points include bystander Howard Lewis (Whitaker), Brooks, the love interest of one of the Spanish terrorists and the head of security for the president.

The movie begins with the climax, abandoning the traditional structure of a film. Its entirety is comprised of eight different rewinds, a concept borrowed from the 1950 Japanese film "Rashômon" in which director Akira Kurosawa explores a mysterious crime from differing view points.

This idea proved brilliant for "Rashômon" and resulted in an Oscar nomination. But I see no such success for "Vantage Point," which fails to hold the continued interest of its audience, one that doesn't typically see an action flick to deal with a story problem.

The cinematography is extremely choppy and difficult to follow due to extensive use of the "shaky camera" technique. Several plot lines are not easily pieced together and remain scrambled amid the mess of each character's viewpoint.

As for the acting, it's not awful, but it's certainly not the performance expected from such a star-studded cast. Emotions lack range in the film, which, of course, revolves around the same events.

The one redemption of this story line comes for those who stay awake long enough to get through the continuous cycles of recollection: a high-speed car chase with brilliant cinematography and stunt coordination.

Still, it didn't make me forget the disappointment of a movie I had just witnessed.

* Brandon Riel attends Riverside Christian School.