Vantage Point offers us a bizarre spectacle: the action flick as pseudo-cubist experiment, replaying one fateful 15-minute stretch encompassing the apparent assassination of the American President (William Hurt) from a panoply of POVs. It’s a serviceable enough gimmick, but that’s all it is — a device that allows the filmmakers to judiciously parcel out narrative information so as to leave us dangling at each push of the reset button.

The problem is that the more we learn about what’s going on, the less credible it becomes; by the sixth run-through, we’ve entered a particularly stupid episode of 24 as guest-directed by Costa-Gavras. The actors, including Dennis Quaid (reprising Clint Eastwood’s haunted In the Line of Fire character) and Forest Whitaker (as an unassuming neo-Zapruder) do what they can with the material, which isn’t much; eventually, everyone is reduced to some combination of sprinting, screaming and bleeding as the amusingly circuitous terrorist plot —we’re talking Cobra-level subterfuge here — blows a fuse (or three) and the action converges beneath an underpass. At which point we get the crudest bit of movie child endangerment since Crash — a pitiful attempt at stakes-raising in a film that’s already flown hopelessly over the top.