Vantage Point
Rashomon, but ripping off Bourne, with a Kennedy-style assassination in Salamanca, ironically produced by “Original Films”. The most unrealistic part is how Spaniards can talk and understand English, and an American Secret Service guy can drive stick.
There’s four Rashomon story recaps, then it turns into Bourne for the last 30 minutes. Starts with the CNN expy (because that’s another megacorp that owns the brand, and Fox News would be laughable) censoring anti American protests. There is the secret service guy and guy that took a bullet targeted at POTUS, and is now being called Section 8 material to hid back. The real Spanish cop gets another part, and so does the terrorist leader.
The attackers even know the “president” is a double, but shoot him anyway. The whole plot is riddled with holes and stupid lines that do not hold up to scrutiny. The guy from Lost is the Secret Service mole, this thing has it all.
No wonder that’s what frightens people about terrorism, the op was flawless: an inside man, a shooting the president with an automated gun platform, then blowing up the stage, but that’s just a distraction from another separate suicide bomber and a special ops guy being blackmailed.
The car thing is laughable. Our hero commandeers a Chevrolet (in Europe? Extremely rare) and he can just drive it, using a stick shift. The laughable part is that car is clearly an Opel Corsa with the Chevrolet logo pasted in.
The chase sequences are literal Bourne ripoffs, I bet it’s the same stunt crew. The climax is absolutely laughable, the terrorists that just murdered hundreds of people foil their plan by swerving to avoid killing a little girl. The charitable option is to consider the guy that planned the whole thing was a coward and could not actual kill by his hand.
William Hurt is the Obama-like (from the campaign, not drone strike king Barack). Forest Whitaker plays a lonesome divorced Abraham Zapruder. Only the local plainclothes cop is played by an actual Spaniard. Ayelet Zurer is Israeli, and the other fake cop (from Bourne and Wasp Network) is Venezuelan. Her Spanish is atrocious.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.