Never have I seen a movie equal so much less than the sum of its parts.

Vantage Point starts out as an ambitious movie with a lot of potential. During a terrorist attack in Salamanca, Spain there is an assassination attempt on the American president, who is in there to give a speech. This attack and its immediate aftermath are seen through the eyes of eight different people: a jumpy secret service agent returned to the field after getting shot months before (Dennis Quaid), an American tourist trying to put the break-up of his marriage behind him (Forest Whitaker), a Spanish police officer distracted by his lover’s possible duplicity (Edgar Ramirez), the possibly duplicitous lover of the police officer (Ayelet Zurer), a Special Forces soldier (Eduardo Noriega), a TV news producer (Sigourney Weaver), a terrorist (Said Taghmaoui), and the American president himself (William Hurt).

Each character’s viewpoint is taken forward, and then, with some cool editing, time is literally rewound and we live that span of time with the next character (although with some characters, twenty minutes plays out in ten). This works at first. The plot has a lot of urgency, and while it is frustrating to constantly lose any forward plot momentum just when things are getting particularly intriguing, we accept this because of the promise of a big payoff.

Therein lies Vantage Point’s problem: it is all set up and no delivery. As each character is revisited, the plot’s initial promise is short-changed, leaving unanswered questions, unraveling plot threads, and viewers gnashing their teeth. Most short-changed is Edgar Ramirez’s policeman whose plotline resolution is so unsatisfying as to be almost insulting. The viewer is left feeling bewildered and wondering why the powers that be in this movie decided to only give the American characters what little exposition the movie actually has, and why several actors with such dramatic heft took roles in a movie that would never showcase such talent. If the movie showcases anything, it is the action sequences, detracting from what little plot there is. The plotline isn’t nearly as convoluted as the writer seems to think.

Dennis Quaid is clearly the hero and he manages to give his secret service agent some tics and quirks that play nicely as he runs all over, trying to catch the terrorists responsible (whose motives are never explained, by the way). He is in the movie’s most exciting sequence, a prolonged, nail-biting car chase that must have been a bear to film.

Nevertheless, a car chase can’t save this movie. The shame is that it wouldn’t have taken that much effort to make sense of this mess. If ten minutes of character motivation, personal resolutions , and a couple of explanations had been interspersed throughout this 86 minute film, it could have added up to a lot more.