Movies: Non-thrilling Thriller Double Feature

Suspense is one of the hardest things to create and maintain in a piece of fiction. Yeah, you can slap buckets of gore on there, you can have big explosions or loud noises, but without suspense, almost any movie falls flat on its face. Here are a couple of thrillers that needed a shot of suspense badly but didn't get it:

Vantage Point

Couldn't be easier, right? Political assassination action-thriller is almost its own genre now, starting with standouts like "The Day of the Jackal" and "The Manchurian Candidate" (never mind the awful remakes) and even including today's mass-market Clancy and "Bourne" movies. That's why it's hard to forgive "Vantage Point," a 2008 flick directed by Pete Travis:



POTUS is attending a major counter-terrorism conference in Spain, and it looks like someone is out to assassinate him. Appearances are deceiving, though, and as the action is played and replayed through a Rashomon-lite series of flashbacks, the true (boring) nature of the conspiracy is revealed. The constant winding and rewinding of the relatively simple plot (whose twists and surprise villains are apparent about half an hour in) is a tedious move that destroys any suspense the film could have generated. Add in some lazy coincidences and you have a completely forgettable movie.

Production values are still good, though, and the best part of "Vantage Point" is when Secret Service Agent Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid) engages in a high-speed car chase through crowded Spanish streets. It feels like a warmed-over rehash of the "Bourne" series and "Ronin," but I guess sometimes it's better to imitate good movies and fail than to try something original.

4/10

The X Files: I Want to Believe

The first "X-Files" movie was heavily steeped in the series mythology, which limited its audience right off the bat. With a big $60 million budget and at least a nominally exciting script, though, it was fairly successful. Now, many years after the end of both the fictional and the real "X-Files," Mulder and Scully team up once again in "The X-Files: I Want to Believe":



Amanda Peet and Xzibit co-star as FBI agents assigned to the case, but they really just serve as annoying nannies for Mulder and Scully. As a whole, it's a noticeably smaller production, and by necessity "I Want to Believe" features the striking, snowy Vancouver landscapes that have come to define the series instead of more exotic locales. Even that difficulty could be overcome if it were not for a mostly low-wattage plot involving the strange disappearances of several women.

Longtime fans of the series know that many of the TV plots didn't involve aliens or vampires, but merely ordinary crimes with marginally paranormal elements. Casual folks walking into "I Want to Belive" expecting CSM or the black oil or Samantha are going to be disappointed. It's a "monster-of-the-week" storyline without the monster. Philosophically, I can understand the statement Chris Carter is trying to make about faith and belief, but it just doesn't make for gripping cinema.

As a result, the whole thing feels like it could have been edited down into an hour-long episode of the series; the 104 minute runtime is completely unnnecessary. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson have proven to be fine performers (Duchovny's had some recent success with "Californication," and Anderson is still doing feature films and theatre work); they deserve another shot at this, preferably with a bigger budget.

4/10