What it’s about
US President Henry Ashton attends a summit in Spain to sign a treaty but is shot by an unknown sniper. Subsequently, an explosion takes place in the square, which leads to absolute chaos.
My thoughts
Despite the unique storytelling style this is basically a run-of-the-mill action film, so someone gets shot in this case the president, someone has to chase the shooter and there is much shooting and a car chase from a car which has been commandeered et cetera et cetera.
In terms of the unique story making style, basically as said the president is assassinated and the moments leading up to and right after the assassination are told from several different perspectives.
What this means is rather than a normal film in which time moves normally, we watch the same moment happen several times over but from the perspectives of different characters, each character providing another piece of the puzzle.
With that said first things first about this film it is short, and considering that in reality it is only telling a period of time of about thirty minutes or so in total, and is telling those thirty minutes again and again but from different perspectives, and there is not any depth to the story, it needs to be.
In terms of whether it works, after the fourth or fifth perspective change the film starts to drag namely because it is only reaching the point of the assassination and not moving beyond it, and there is not much story to it, but thankfully the director has realised that this is the limit and has allowed the film to really kick on from this point with the action properly taking off.
And when the action takes off this becomes a surprisingly pleasing to watch action thriller, nothing special which is likely why it receives such a poor critical response, but as an action film it is entertaining. The only real gripe I have with it is how it ends, without giving anything away basically rather than Dennis Quaid’s character using his smarts to save the day, basically he gets lucky.
I have to say I am not a fan at all of endings where the good guy only saves the day because of pure luck, it just screams of laziness from both the director and writer. And I have to say I believe this film deserved a better ending. In fact it deserved a better story full stop, especially considering this was a film told using such a unique style. It was just begging a more compelling story than just your standard run-of-the-mill action film story of someone gets shot good guy chases bad guy et cetera et cetera.
But that aside this is still a highly watchable action film which is told in a unique way, and as Dennis Quaid and Forest Whitaker put in solid performances as the lead characters, that means all in all this film gets a thumbs up from me.
Director: Pete Travis
Writer: Barry L Levy
Genre: action, thriller, crime
Year: 2008
Runtime: 90 minutes
Story Maniacs 