BY BOB STRAUSS >FILM CRITIC

"Vantage Point" is almost as exciting as it is ridiculous. Emphasis on the almost.

The latest movie to pull the old Akira Kurosawa trick of repeatedly revisiting a crime through witnesses who all saw something different, this highly contrived, crazily kinetic political thriller often operates more like Pokemon than "Rashomon."

But it's pretty well put together for what it is, howling unintentional laughs aside. Until the climax, when you just can't forgive the howling unintentional laughs anymore.

Basically, we watch the same shooting down of an American president (William Hurt) in Spain eight times. There are rewinds at the ends of each segment (which caused lots of chuckles in the theater I was at).

Then we start the day again with a new person's back story, learn a little more each time about the assassination attempt, and the overall narrative is nudged further forward.

The vantage pointers are a couple of Secret Service agents (Dennis Quaid and Matthew Fox), a hard-nosed TV news producer (Sigourney Weaver), an American tourist (Forest Whitaker) who just happens to be in the crowded Salamanca square recording the whole scene on his vidcam, a couple of the plotters, a dupe or two and I forget who else.

Barry L. Levy's script is Byzantinely complicated and doesn't make a lick of sense. It's corny as all get-out, too, although Hurt manages to rattle off some wry one-liners that are actually supposed to be funny. The bad guys are presumably Muslims, but the movie is fuzzy in the motives department and has absolutely nothing to say about real issues and conflicts in this world of ours.

Oh, and a little girl might get run over.

Which brings me to the best thing about the film. British director Pete Travis missed his calling: He should have been a traffic cop.

There are so many elements moving back and forth in "Vantage Point" - literally thousands of bits of visual information - that staging and keeping them all straight must have required 20 pairs of eyes. But Travis, somehow, is always in control of every preposterous direction this thing winds off in. He's also a darn good action stager (and considering the film was mostly shot in high-altitude Mexico City, that could hardly have been easy), and puts us right in the drivers' seats of one of the better car chases of recent years.

Travis apparently learned some technique from "The Bourne Ultimatum's" great Paul Greengrass, who wrote and produced Travis' feature-directing debut, "Omagh." That was a terrific movie about a bombing in Northern Ireland, told like "Vantage Point" from multiple perspectives.

But "Omagh" was a well-written story about real people and politics that respected the seriousness of its subject. Resemblances to "Vantage Point," then, are no more than meets the eye.

Bob Strauss, (818) 713-3670
bob.strauss@dailynews.com

review>

VANTAGE POINT

>PG-13: violence, language, children in peril.
>Starring: Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, Forest Whitaker, William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Edgar Ramirez.
>Director: Pete Travis.
>Running time: 1 hr. 30 min.
>Playing: Citywide.
>In a nutshell: Assassination attempt on a U.S. president in Spain grows increasingly complex -- and preposterous - as it's observed repeatedly from eight different perspectives.

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Read Bob Strauss' Interview with Matthew Fox