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Producer Neil H. Moritz, the poor man's Jerry Bruckheimer, resuscitates a moribund genre with Vantage Point: the all-star B event picture of Irwin Allen's `70s. Starring Dennis Quaid, Forest Whitaker, William Hurt, and Matthew Fox, Point fashions its Towering Inferno cast into an assassination story on Hurt's U.S. president while giving a counterterrorism speech in a Spanish plaza. Quaid reasserts himself in the action-hero vein as the Secret Service agent out to foil the conspiracy that you watch eight times from different characters' perspectives. It starts off really well, with Sigourney Weaver and her TV crew laying out the plot by taping the event from the media uplink center of phony cable network GNN--imagine a hybrid of Fox News' censorial right-wing editorializing covered by CNN's supposedly liberal anchors. As it unfolds, however, the retreading of the same events again and again wears thin. By the time Point stops monkeying around and stays in forward motion, Quaid and Whitaker zero in on the obvious, clichéd Arab Terrorist Mastermind (Said Taghmaoui) and his Spanish co-conspirators out to stop "freedom" at any cost. Shaky cameras, snap zooms, and time shuttling don't disguise the old-fashioned hackneyed ideas of patriotism in play here.