The Hindu : Karnataka News : It’s a puzzle called terrorism

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Sunday, Mar 02, 2008
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Karnataka

Karnataka

It’s a puzzle called terrorism

NEWS AS STORY: Matthew Fox, William Hurt and Dennis Quaid in ‘Vantage Point’.

Vantage Point (English)

Cast: Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, William Hurt, Forest Whitaker

Director: Pete Travis

The tagline tells you all – eight strangers, eight points of view and one truth. All these elements combine to form a fairly-engrossing thriller. The President of the United States, Ashton, is going to make a speech in Spain at a summit on the global war on terror. Secret service agents Thomas Barnes (who earlier took a bullet for the President) and Kent Taylor are assigned to protect him. The President is shot and there is a massive bomb blast.

The first part of the movie is a series of rewinds to the crucial 23 minutes when it all happened from different points of view. The first, from the newsroom, is the most effective. Then there is the story from the perspective of an American tourist with his camcorder, the President, the secret service agents and a cop.

The second half of the movie is from the terrorists’ point of view and serves to fit the missing pieces together to make the complete picture.

The cast is chock-a-block with A-listers from Dennis Quaid as doughty Barnes to Forrest Whitaker fresh from his Academy Award success as Idi Amin in Last King of Scotland playing the tourist. Lording it over everyone is William Hurt as the President. And surprise, surprise, there is Sigourney Weaver as TV news producer Rex in a blink-and-you-will-miss-it appearance.

The pitfall of using technology to tell a story is that it gets dated pretty soon.

MINI ANTHIKAD-CHHIBBER

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