This review was originally published February 22, 2008.

The suspension of disbelief in Vantage Point may be difficult to maintain at times, but it nonetheless provides decent action thrills guaranteed to satisfy your adrenaline, if not your grey matter. As guilty pleasures go, this is one of the better ones.

Told from multiple points of view, the plot takes place within 15 minutes, 6 different ways. The president (William Hurt) is speaking at some important peace rally in Spain when he is picked off by gunfire. Secret Service agents Thomas Barnes and Kent Taylor (Dennis Quaid and Matthew Fox respectively) must try and piece together what is really going on. Sigourney Weaver and Forest Whitaker round out the cast, although neither of them is given much to do.

The first perspective virgin film director Pete Travis gives the audience is riveting, feeding you bits and pieces of the puzzle to pique your curiosity. Then things ‘rewind’ and you find yourself back at the beginning. The second time through, everything is told from a completely different point of view, adding to the mystery. Rewind. Third time the charm begins to wear off, and here is where most viewers will tune out. Depending on your patience threshold for seeing essentially the same stuff over and over again, you will either enjoy the film for what it is or groan with boredom. When the Big (and slightly Predictable) Twist happens, some may shrug and enjoy the rest of the ride (like myself), while others may hurl their Jujubes at the screen in rage. And those are expensive Jujubes.

Part of the problem with the gimmick is that it gives virgin film scripter Barry Levy (a lot of first timers on this one) no time to develop meaningful characters. Take Forest Whitaker’s character. We are told he has separated from his wife, misses his children, and is in Europe vacationing by himself, all in the span of 2 minutes. Such deep, personal information gets crammed into whatever spare nook is available to the script, making the characters flat and hollow. Whitaker is a powerful actor, too, hot off his Best Actor win for The Last King of Scotland, so it’s disappointing his role is reduced to Most Useless Perspective here (you could completely remove his character from the film and it wouldn’t change a thing).

Lastly, to harp on one of my bigger pet peeves, Vantage Point commits the sin of giving its villains the God Gadget. You know the one I’m talking about, where the evil mastermind shuts down the internet with a cell phone or hacks into the Department of Defense using a thumbnail drive. Here the culprit is an extraordinarily versatile PDA, which I fully expected to perform mind control before the credits rolled. I’m just surprised Hollywood hasn’t caught on to the iPhone yet; I bet they could use that thing to launch cruise missiles.

Despite my facetiousness, Vantage Point delivered what it promised. Check your expectations at the door, and once you reach the action packed climax you won’t even notice the gaping holes you had to go through to get there.