The 23 minutes is seen through the eyes of eight unrelated parties.  Dennis Quaid and Matthew Fox as Secret Services Agents, Forest Whitaker as a video taking tourist, William Hurt as the President and Sigourney Weaver as a producer of multinational news organization all star in principal roles.  These five actors/actresses are not exactly second rate talent. Weaver and Quaid put in the best performances without a doubt.

Because of the film’s technique using different characters that view the same 23 minutes and showing the audience what they perceive, Vantage Point is often compared, unfavorably, to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), which was the first movie to use this technique to tell the story of a rape/murder in order to question the possibility of “truth.”  Rashomon was also the film that introduced Kurosawa to the west.  Unlike the “Rashomon Effect,” which tries to piece together the different perspectives and viewpoints in order to reveal a justly “truthful” account of what happened, Vantage Point instead opts to cut and paste plot and dialogue in between special effects, kidnapping, assassination and terrorism scenes.  While Vantage Point does reveal the assassination attempt from various points of view, in Rashomon those views are shown as flashbacks.  However, in Vantage Point each point of view is not a flashback, instead it merely provides a certain view of the story, while the story (supposedly) moves forward.

In Vantage Point, U.S. President Henry Ashton (William Hurt) attends a political gala in Salamanca, Spain peddling an international anti-terrorism treaty—I am sure one that will infringe on our civil liberties even more.  The assassination attempt on the President occurs over a time span of 23 minutes.  Whenever the 23 minutes have run their course with the relevant character, the events start from the next vantage point.  Each segment reveals additional details that complete the superficial story behind the assassination.  There are eight segments; out of mercy I will only describe three.

Viewpoint number one: GNN producer Rex Brooks (Sigourney Weaver) is in charge of the media personnel there to cover the event from a mobile television studio.  The Mayor (Jose Carlos Rodriguez) delivers a short introduction for the President, but the President is shot twice as he approaches the podium.  An explosion outside the plaza soon follows.  Moments later, the podium itself is destroyed by a larger secondary explosion, killing and injuring numerous people.  As the smoke clears, GNN reporter Angie Jones (Zoe Saldana) is seen lying dead in the rubble.Vantage Point [2008] The TV Studio. 

The second perspective follows Secret Service agents Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid) and Kent Taylor (Matthew Fox).  While on post, Barnes notices a curtain fluttering in the window of a nearby building that was allegedly vacated.  He also observes American tourist Howard Lewis (Forest Whitaker) filming the audience.  After the President is shot, Barnes tackles a man rushing to the podium named Enrique (Eduardo Noriega).  Taylor pursues a lead to a potential assassin.  Following the second explosion, Barnes barges into the GNN mobile studio and asks to view their footage.  He calls Taylor, who reports the direction of the suspected assassin’s escape route.  Barnes then views an image on one of the camera’s live feeds that startles him and prompts him to run out without saying a word.

By the sixth vantage point, we have been introduced to terrorist Suarez, who shoots Ashton’s body double using a remote-controlled automatic rifle placed in an adjacent window next to the one with the fluttering curtain that had drawn Barnes’ attention earlier.  The rifle is retrieved by Taylor, whom Barnes sees leaving the scene wearing a Spanish policeman’s uniform on one of the GNN live feeds, even though he tells Barnes that he’s in pursuit of the assassin over the phone.  Barnes realizes Taylor is actually part of the terror plot.  The man Enrique saw embracing Veronica (who we meet in one of the earlier vantage points) is revealed to be sharpshooter Javier (Edgar Ramirez), whose brother is being held hostage to ensure Javier’s cooperation with the terrorists.  Javier kills the guards and aides within the hotel, and kidnaps the President.  Ashton is later placed in an ambulance with Suarez and Veronica disguised as medics.  At the overpass, Enrique, who did not die in the blast at the podium as intended, confronts Javier and Taylor.  Enraged, Javier shoots Enrique, mistakenly believing he had knowledge of his kidnapped brother’s whereabouts.  Javier is then shot and killed by Taylor when he demands to be brought to his brother, who had been killed earlier by Suarez.  Enrique dies of his wounds as Barnes reaches the scene on foot firing several rounds at Taylor, who attempts to flee.  After crashing his car, a critically injured Taylor is dragged out by Barnes.  He orders Taylor to reveal where the President has been taken, but Taylor dies.  Barnes runs to an ambulance where he sees Veronica lying dead.  He shoots Suarez dead and rescues the President—tying everything up nice and neat in less than 2 hours.

In the end this film all winds up—or trickles down—to yet another chase through crowded streets in commandeered cars, with an ending meant to be ironic but that simply provides a crowning howler to all the nonsense.  Unlike Akira Kurosawa’s classic film Rashomon, which is structured around multiple retellings of the same event, in Vantage Point nothing is gained from all the stopping and restarting.  Aside from the meager changing-perspectives device, the film has nothing going on and there doesn’t seem to be any reason for adopting this strategy which gets really old after about the fourth time. Vantage Point, like several other movies we have reviewed here at JPFmovies, is yet another example of Hollywood making an action-adventure movie that is short on plot intricacies but long on gimmicks and explosives. No amount of ripening time would make this artificial and ultimately harebrained movie anything more than crude, nerve-grinding and finally as un-salvageable as the car accidents it keeps inflicting on its characters.

Clearly, this is not a movie to take its audience’s intelligence for granted.

People have a love-hate relationship with this film.  Many, especially younger people, believe it is (at best) a cheap sci-fi want-to-be made by idiots for idiots.  Others look at The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension! and see it as brilliant because it is at once a spoof of 50’s era science fiction and a celebration of all sci-fi in general.  The film is a cross between the action/adventure and science-fiction movie genres, and also includes elements of comedy, satire, and cheap, cheap romance.  Well a movie can’t be all things to all people and anyone who knows anything about movies would have seen this film and known it was destined for the controversial cult classic list.  If you like sci-fi and don’t take yourself too seriously to laugh at the genre sometimes, then you will probably like Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!

Let’s take a look at the cast.  Buckaroo Banzai was directed and produced by W. D. Richter (writer of Brubaker and Big Trouble in Little China (excellent movie)) and has a pretty impressive supporting cast including John Lithgow as Dr. Emilio Lizardo/Lord John Whorfin, Ellen Barkin as Penny Priddy, Christopher Lloyd as John Bigbooté, Peter Weller as Buckaroo Banzi and Jeff Goldblum as New Jersey.  For a low budget sci-fi that is a pretty impressive cast—remember that Lloyd would go on to co-star in Back to the Future the next year–one of the biggest box office hits in history. 

Ok so far we have a film that is going to be a spoof and a strong cast. There is only one thing left, the story.  The story is where the film loses its appeal to the great unwashed philistines who unfortunately comprise a vast percentage of the movie going audience.  I will concede that the film’s plot has many twists, turns and stops but anyone who does not have a serious case of ADD should be able to follow it.

Now to try to sum it up.  The film opens with Banzai is preparing to test run a heavily modified Ford E-Series van powered by a jet engine capable of exceeding Mach 1.  The car is also equipped with an “oscillation overthruster,” that looks just like a flux capacitor and that Banzai and his comrades, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, hope will allow the truck to drive through solid matter.  The test is a success; Banzai drives the Jet Car directly through a mountain and emerges on the other side, but finds that an alien organism has attached itself to the “car.”

Learning of Banzai’s success, mad scientist Dr. Emilio Lizardo breaks out of the mental hospital for the criminally insane, where he has been a resident for 50 years.  A black and white flashback shows Dr. Hikita (Robert Ito) (Banzai’s mentor) present at a failed overthruster experiment of Lizardo’s in 1938, trapping Lizardo briefly in the 8th dimension where his mind is taken over by Lord John Whorfin.

Whorfin is the leader of the Red Lectroids, a race of alien reptiles who waged an expansionist campaign against Planet 10.  After being defeated by the peace-loving Black Lectroids, Whorfin and his group were banished into the void of the 8th dimension.  Kind of like the villains in Super Man II but with no mirror.  Lizardo’s failed experiment accidentally released Whorfin, and he soon brings many of the Red Lectroids to Earth in an incident that was accurately reported in 1938 by Orson Welles in his radio broadcast The War of the Worlds, only to be retracted as fiction.

The Red Lectroids are incognito as owners and employees of a defense firm named Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems.  The Reds have been building a large spacecraft in the guise of a US Air Force program, the Truncheon bomber.  They intend to rescue any remaining 8th dimension exiles and then try to take over Planet 10 again.  Whorfin plans to steal the overthruster because they can’t make one of their own.  Banzai’s team finds out about what really is going on at Yoyodyne and hacks into their computer only to discover that everyone there has the first name John. At first they believe it’s a joke, but then they notice all the Yoyodyne employees applied for Social Security cards on November 1, 1938 and all in the same town, Grover’s Mill, New Jersey.

In the meantime, a Black Lectroid spacecraft orbiting Earth contacts Banzai, giving him an electric shock that enables him to see through Lectroids’ camouflage (kind of like in Predator they change their image—the Black Lectroids appear to be Rastafarian Jamaicans, while Red Lectroids are Caucasians.)  The ship also sends a “thermo-pod” to Earth, with a holographic message from the Black Lectroids’ leader, John Emdall, that gives an ultimatum: stop Whorfin and his army or the Black Lectroids will protect themselves by staging a fake nuclear attack, causing World War III.

With help from the Hong Kong Cavaliers, a collection of civilian volunteers named “The Blue Blaze Irregulars,” and a young woman named Penny Priddy (Ellen Barkin) (a long-lost twin sister of Buckaroo’s late wife), Buckaroo succeeds in his mission, destroying the Red Lectroids and saving Earth.

Whew, that was not the easiest summary to write.  The talented cast each play their roles well and the film overall is low budget and looks it.  The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!, with its low-budget look and cheesy special effects, fits with its theme of a spoof of 1950’s era science fiction films and all things sci-fi in general.  If you can’t laugh at sci-fi don’t bother with this movie you would probably take it personally.  Where do I stand on this movie?  Well I like it, but I don’t think it is the end all be all of cult movies.