This Dennis Quaid-Matthew Fox thriller focuses on a hypothetical presidential assassination on foreign soil and tells its tale from several different perspectives, giving away new information each time the same events are replayed with a new focal character. The movie is fast-paced, sharp and full of surprises throughout, despite the repetition, and yet … something’s missing.

Perhaps it’s the Class B casting, which aside from LOST’s Matthew Fox, mainly features stars who were at their prime twenty years ago, but are long past it these days. That includes Quaid, as well as co-stars Sigourney Weaver and William Hurt (all in need of some diet pills, perhaps), as well as – arguably – Forest Whitaker.

The casting puts the movie at a dramatically noticeable disadvantage, but that’s not the only one weighing it down. The additional baggage is that Vantage Point came out around the same time as several other “Hollywood wish-fulfillment” movies focusing on presidential assassination plots, including such purely political drivel as “Death of A President,” perhaps the worst of the bunch, which used digital manipulation techniques to fake the assassination of a real, sitting president of the United States – in this case, George W. Bush.

Another such film in the genre, which seems fueled by Hollywood’s Bush-hatred syndrome, is “Death of a High School President.” None of these other movies have any particular charm or interest to them.

Vantage Point, however, is at least a respectful step or two away from the extreme marked by “Death of a President.” William Hurt played the president in Vantage Point and is nothing like W, placing the film’s plot more safely in the fictional thriller category; still, the negative associations to “Death of a President” probably shortened this film’s run at the box office, though the casting of Fox helped it debut at the top of the box office in its first week of release.

Had “Vantage Point” been released in a world that had never seen “Death of a President,” it could have been enjoyed as the fictional thriller it was intended as. Of course, the film could have been helped considerably by smarter casting, as Fox is the only current and appealing star in the film.