Witnesses to assassination

In the white-knuckle thriller

Vantage Point

all eyes are on Salamanca, Spain, where leaders of the free world have convened for an antiterrorism summit. At high noon in Plaza Mayor, as U.S. President Ashton (William Hurt) strides to the podium to announce a signed treaty, he is felled by an assassin's bullet, frustrating the best efforts to curb terrorism.

The ensuing chaos poses moral and mortal challenges for members of the president's security detail (Dennis Quaid and Matthew Fox), for a Spanish policeman (Eduardo Noriega), for a journalist (Sigourney Weaver), and for an American eyewitness (Forest Whitaker), each of whom sees just one piece of the attempted-assassination puzzle.

A gesture that looks suspicious from one angle looks patriotic from another. That flutter of a curtain in a plaza-adjacent building that's presumably evacuated may be a gambit to distract police and the president's security detail.

The pulse-pounding thriller, which takes place roughly between noon and 12:15 on the fateful day, regards the events from five subjective points of view, prompting the viewer to deduce objective truths.

Irish filmmaker Pete Travis and screenwriter Barry Levy combine the first-person perspective of

Rashomon

with the real-time element of

24

. Though more attached to their narrative gimmick than their characters, the filmmakers hook us and reel us in during 90 breathless minutes.

The plot twists play out on Salamanca's twisty sandstone streets, where good guys are in fevered pursuit of bad guys, though often it's hard to tell the difference.

(However cinegenic Salamanca looks, know that the film's exteriors were largely shot in Cuernavaca and Puebla, Mexico, not Spain.)

Because

Vantage Point

is really a concept movie, the actors are not much more than pawns on the chessboard: They move one square at a time.

Within these constraints, Weaver makes a strong impression as a news producer of a CNN-type program finding the telling perspective among all the camera positions she supervises. She is the surrogate for the audience, who have seen what has happened and are struggling to figure out the how, why and who.

Quaid, Fox and Noriega, all stone-faced and sweating it, are compulsively watchable as men a heartbeat away from their presidents. Since each may be implicated in what went wrong, we don't know how sincere any of them is in his attempts to put things right.

Least satisfying in this cast is Whitaker, the American tourist with a camcorder, who inevitably manages to be in the right place for gathering evidence.

Directed by Pete Travis. With Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, Edgar Ramirez, Forest Whitaker, Sigourney Weaver and Ayelet Zurer. Distributed by Columbia Pictures.

Running time:

1 hour, 30 mins.

Parent's guide:

PG-13 (violence, profanity, mature themes)

Playing at:

area theaters