Pop Terrorism: A review of “Vantage Point”

Vantage Point (2008) is a fairly good political thriller technically speaking, but woefully inadequate in substance.

It has an excellent cast—including Sigourney Weaver, Dennis Quaid, William Hurt, Forest Whitaker, Matthew Fox and James LeGros—though it was not a blockbuster and did not take long to go to video.

The complex plot basically revolves around the ingeniously clever attempt of a terrorist cell to assassinate the American President (played by William Hurt) while he gives a public speech in Spain. The average viewer whose brain has been saturated with politically correct multi-culturalism (PC MC) would conclude from the movie that terrorists can be Spaniards who have no apparent connections at all to Islam, and that one of their ringleaders can be Matthew Fox (of Lost fame), a white Secret Service agent for inexplicable reasons gone “rogue”—save for one fleeting scene that hints at a preposterous explanation of a “double life” he is finally glad to be shedding (an explanation made all the more preposterous by Matthew Fox’s pathetic accent trying to speak what is supposed to be his Spanish mother tongue).

Only briefly, and only twice, is the Islamic factor suggested—but of course not in so many words. In one hasty interchange between the President and his advisors at one point, there is mention of some terrorists based out of Morocco who have threatened a strike in Spain. That’s it: just “Morocco”. Nothing about Islam or Muslims. The second suggestion is when a key player in the plot, a suicide bomber wearing explosives under his jacket, touchingly puts his fingers on the photograph of what must be his wife, a Middle Eastern woman wearing a hijab, moments before he sets out to blow up the lobby of the plaza near where the President is delivering his public address. When seconds before he detonates himself, he receives a text message from his fellow terrorists who send him one last message of encouragement, the message only reads “Make us proud”. A far more appropriate, and accurate, message would have been “Allahu Akbar”.

Most of the terrorists are brown and vaguely Middle Eastern looking, this is true. But they could easily be Spaniards from the south of Spain; and anyway, they all have Spanish names and all speak Spanish (with subtitles) when they are not speaking English with an accent that is generically “foreign” with a dash of Middle Eastern twang (which pretty much all Mediterraneans, Muslim and non-Muslim, have). One of them is a decidedly pale female Spaniard, and another, as mentioned above, is the all-American and very white Matthew Fox. To complete the absurdity, one of the key terrorists has a Spanish name (Suarez) and speaks Spanish, but is played by an actor with the markedly Arabic name of Saïd Taghmaoui! (All the other actors who play terrorists, except for Matthew Fox, have Spanish names.)

That’s it. Most viewers who haven’t educated themselves about the global danger of Islam would come away from this movie thinking that terrorism is some complex, amorphous and inexplicable phenomenon where a bunch of Spaniards and a white Secret Service agent with no coherent motivation (other than one brief mention of “American arrogance”) could easily be a mortal danger that results in the assassination attempt on an American President and the mass-murders and injuries of countless innocent people from a suicide-bombing in a public place. While it is likely that the writer (Barry Levy) and director (Pete Travis) are slyly telegraphing some crumbs to viewers who expect most of their terrorists to at least be brown and vaguely Middle Eastern in appearance, this by itself is a pathetic substitute for a more intelligent script that would make clearer the true context of actual terrorism in the real world. Perhaps, though, I should beware of what I ask for: for, when Hollywood does try to be more intelligent about these issues—e.g., the George Clooney vehicle, Syriana (which I might review in the near future)—they only make matters worse.

Moreover, if a writer and director of a political thriller about terrorism dared to be too clear in our real world, they would have to worry about real death threats from real Muslims. As stupid as most Hollywood writers and directors are, they probably cannot wholly exorcize this semi-conscious concern from their minds; and that, along with their guiding PC MC, dictates the rigidly limited perameters of the box in which they create any movies dealing with terrorism.

In sum, if Hollywood cannot make a truly intelligent political thriller, it would be better off to avoid the subject of terrorism altogether—or at least be honest about their ridiculous interpretation of it by remaking the Keystone Kops whenever they do so. Instead, we get a curious hybrid of unintentionally comic absurdity in terms of substance, and accomplished technical skill in terms of execution: Pop Terrorism.