When the action of your movie takes place in a foreign country, you either go there to shoot most of the film, or work hard on your research of the place so you can make an accurate recreation. For "Vantage Point" they did neither of them.

Spain and Mexico are quite different places. Cars, streets, traffic signs, accents, people... are different so, if you want to make a mexican city look like a spanish one, in this case one so unique like Salamanca, the least you could do would be making the effort of paying attention to details. Building a replica of the Plaza Mayor of Salamanca and shooting some images of the real city from the air is not enough.

Besides the above mentioned, there's one more detail about the movie that shocked me: Secret Service agents can do whatever they want when they're in a foreign country. They can shoot in the middle of the street and no one complains. They can arrest anyone they want, including policemen.

Local police (in this case spanish) are there only to control the crowds, when something happens, SS takes full control of the city and can do whatever they want. Local law enforcement agents look like a bunch of morons who can only wander around doing nothing useful in a time of crisis (that if you can see one of them). I certainly hope all those things don't happen in real life...

The terrible recreation of Spain is the first sign of the lost potential of this film, due to the lack of effort put in details. Errors in that recreation are probably only important to a person who knows the place, but the rest of the plot is also lacking that little effort that could have made it good. The story is maybe too simple and, although the way it's edited helps hiding that fact, you can know what's going to happen quite early in the film, even though some important things happen totally by chance making the efforts of the characters totally useless.

"Vantage Point" is not a bad movie, it's entertaining, but is far from being good.

my rating: