2 posts tagged “film reviews”

Having not seen their first one, I really wasn't sure what to expect from this film, other than an Asian guy and an East Indian guy doing drugs and acting funny.  The 18A rating should have tipped me off. 

So Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) are mistaken for terrorists on a plane to Amsterdam and sent to Guantanamo Bay.  They escape and have some crazy adventures trying to get their lives back.  There is mucho full-frontal female nudity, fake full-frontal male nudity (of course), a very bigoted Home Security-type official hunting the boys down, Neil Patrick Harris as himself and ... George W. Bush.  I don't think there's an American film being made today that does not have a version of the President in it. 

The trailers I saw of this film are really quite funny.  Unfortunately all the funny parts are in the trailers.  There are only so many getting-stoned jokes one can make.  The Home Security guy insults many different races with the most offensive "jokes" you can imagine, but the writers (whose only experience is with the Harold and Kumar films) just sound desperate to wring a laugh out of their wanting script.  Apparently black people really love grape pop.  Didn't know that.

Of course they meet the President, who coincidentally loves his pot too.  Oh yeah, each boy has a love interest they get in the end, because that's something else no film dares go without.  And that's hardly a spoiler since hey, of course they get the girls.  Otherwise it would be Harold and Kumar Do Away With Paint-By-Numbers Scripts.

So Mike and I are probably the last people to see this film, since it's been out for quite awhile.  It was much better than I was expecting, since some reviewers didn't care for the repetitiveness.  I think generally they pulled it off.

In a nutshell, the US president is the target of an assassination by terrorists.  Uh-huh, so what else is new?  He's shot, a hotel lobby is blown up, then the grandstand explodes.  This takes place in Salamanca, Spain, where world leaders have gathered for some kind of kick-terrorist-ass summit.  We watch the chain of events from the perspectives of several different people:  a news exec (Sigourney Weaver), a tourist (Forest Whitaker), a Secret Service agent (Dennis Quaid), the terrorists themselves and the president (William Hurt).  While it does get a bit tiresome to keep returning to 12:00 p.m., with each telling we at least learn something new. 

Neither director Pete Travis nor screenwriter Barry Levy has worked on anything of note (no-name films and mini-series), so I'm not sure who is responsible for the hokey aspects of this film.  Whitaker's tourist acts like he's never seen people or buildings before, and he befriends a kid with an ice cream cone.  Unfortunately this kid plays a pivotal role much later in the film, so she keeps popping up in all her wholesome goodness.  There is a lengthy, exciting car chase on the narrow streets of Salamanca in the tiniest subcompacts I've ever seen. 

Despite the replaying of the assassination and the unbeliveable things Whitaker the tourist does (how many other tourists in an unfamiliar country chase Secret Service agents around town?), Vantage Point is an emotionally intense, generally satisfying action/drama that kept me guessing until the end.  As long as I can't predict the "bad guy" within the first 15 minutes of a film, I'm happy.