vantage point...

If I were following the prescribed rules for a responsible citizen of the Globally Organized Intranetwork of Thinking Electric Rigs, or the GOITER, I would preface the following post with a suitable SPOILER alert. Something like this:

****HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!! YO HO!!****

Note that I am very specifically NOT making such a warning. I am going to spoil the movie Vantage Point for you, but I want it to be spoiled for you before you go see it so you have no desire to go see it at all.

There are many, many things wrong with this movie, but I am only going to be able to pay attention to this topic long enough for maybe three or four of them.

1. Here is the biggest spoiler. I'm just going to get it out of the way. If you've never seen a movie before, the revelation I'm about to expose might have been a shock to you, but if you have, it shouldn't be.
Matthew Fox is a BAD GUY. There. Now you know. You might have been able to figure it out by observing the way he did every single thing he did in the movie.
For example:
Dennis Quaid's character says, "Hey! I think I know who the bad guy is! I'm going to go chase him now!"
Matthew Fox's character says, "NO!! No, no, no, no, no!! Don't do that! I'LL do that, because, if, uh... anything goes wrong, I'll take the HEAT for you! Yeah! That's the ticket!"
Matthew Fox's character was living a double life, as a Secret Service agent and as an international terrorist. As you can imagine, this double life is quite draining. He actually says, really and for true he says, "I'm glad this double life is over."
Because, in case you missed it, he was living a double life.
One of the bummers in the movie is that no one's motivations are made clear or even referred to at all.
So, he's living a double life. Okay. How come? What's in it for him? How did he come to it? Why should we care even a tiny, little bit?
Then, uh, later, he dies and everyone says, "Oh. Now he is dead."

2. This is machine of war, possibly imported from Israel:

I know it doesn't look like much, but it is a powerful car. It's sporting a 627-cubic-inch engine which uses racing-derived lightweight technology, including titanium connecting rods and intake valves, to help boost horsepower and rpm capability and is rated at 805 horsepower. When you put the pedal down, it sounds like the growling of a thousand angry tigers.
It can smash through other cars with no ill effects. It can drive down flights of stairs at top speed and maintain its perfect alignment.
It has rally car handling.
It will totally protect you from the same kind of collision that creamed Trinity's phone booth.
It is, using no uncertain terms, a supercar.
3. Terrorists have the best cell phones. The main bad-guy's cell phone could do almost anything. One of the things it did was to act as both the visual aiming device and the firing mechanism for a high-powered sniper rifle. Meaning the terrorist dude was looking at the screen on his cell phone and could see what the scope saw and he could move the gun around and aim it correctly with his stylus. Whew. I can't get on You Tube with my phone.
M claims that this is all perfectly reasonable, especially since they have much better phones and cell service in Europe.
Okay. Say for a second that the phone thing is possible. What about the gun setup?
Doesn't the secret service tend to check out the vicinity around where the president is going to be speaking? I mean, I don't expect them to know the contents of every room within a 5 mile radius because that would be unreasonable.
But how about the rooms that look DIRECTLY down on the stage and podium where the president is going to be? I mean, the buildings are supposed to be emptied of people. The only real way to be sure they are empty of people is if someone CHECKS. Are the Secret Service so concrete that they will only clear the building of people, but shrug off the presence of an electronically manipulated sniper rifle pointing right out the window? There's no way, if you looked in the room where the gun was, that you would not notice a gun WAS.

Of course the gun was then used to shoot the president who wasn't actually the president and the courtyard he was in (but not really) was blown up as a diversion so the terrorists could kidnap the real president who was in another building by getting some special forces dude to break into the room where he was because the terrorists were holding the guy's brother hostage, except they had already killed the brother so they weren't really then they get the president though we never know why, exactly.
Steve and I believe they were going to use the, "Neener, neener! We gots your President!" tactic.
I also hate people in movies who clearly have never seen any movies.
The two main terrorists are driving in the ambulance with the president in it (don't ask) and they have another guy who was with them to... well... he was shooting with a video camera for GNN (THE GLOBAL NEWS NETWORK) and he... uh, shot some footage of the protesters... um... and that's about all he did, really. Not sure why he even came on the trip, honestly.
So, the two main terrorists are talking about "tying up lose ends" and the guy actually says, "What lose ends?"
I've seen movies. If I'm ever sitting near two people who are talking to each other about tying up lose ends after we just kidnapped the president, I'm jumping out the back of the ambulance.
Gosh this movie was the crap.