Rex Brooks (Sigourney Weaver) is a television news director covering the president’s address in Spain in Vantage Point.

Columbia Pictures / Daniel Daza

Despite the high-speed auto chase, the bombs going off, the bullets flying and the terrorists skulking about, Vantage Point can best be described as the Groundhog Day of thrillers.

Buckle your seatbelt as director Peter Travis hits the ground running right from the start and never lets off the lickety-split pacing until the final scene. When it’s over you’ll feel exhausted. Barry L. Levy’s script borrows moments from other movies, including Eyewitness (whose star, Sigourney Weaver, is a hard-driving network TV director rather than reporter here); The Bourne Identity with its roaring auto chase, and especially Groundhog Day.

Vantage Point takes the same scene — the assassination of the president of the United States at an international summit on terrorism in Salamanca, Spain (actually Mexico City) — and then replays that scene again and again and again. But each time it plays, it’s from the angle of a different witness to the crisis. And each time it’s replayed, Levy’s script parcels out a little more information so we can slowly piece together the missing parts of the puzzle to get a clearer picture of what really went on.

In a film of double crosses and triple crosses, many of them played on the audience, there’s lots of room to reassess the situation every time the film rewinds itself back to two seconds before noon on that fateful day, then begins all over again from a slightly different angle.

There are several key players, each with a different take on what happened. Thankfully, Travis doesn’t sit each one of them down to “remember” what happened from his or her vantage point. Rather their stories are jumbled together in a chaotic cacophony of sounds and sights, edited so quickly together that you must pay close attention.

Anxious Secret Service agent Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid) had previously taken an assassin’s bullet meant for President Ashton (William Hurt) and is back on the job for the first time since, not certain he’s ready to jump back in. There’s his cooler partner (Matthew Fox) who gauges Barnes’s reactions closely. There’s a young local policeman (Eduardo Noriega) who fears his girlfriend (Ayelet Zurer) is in love with someone else — or is she? There’s the tourist (Forest Whitaker) who captures everything — he thinks — on his video camera — but does the camera really never lie? There’s the little girl who loses her mother in a horrific bomb blast set off by the terrorists, the hotel bellhop who has something to hide, the hit man (Edgar Ramirez) who has been coerced into this one final big job, the terrorist boss (Said Taghmaoui) who plots the elaborate scheme against the president, and the president himself (Hurt) who is the target of the assassination plot.

Or is it an assassination plot? Vantage Point has many surprises to spring on the audience. What you think you see may not always be real, depending on who’s telling the story.

Travis keeps Vantage Point racing along, usually quite literally as Barnes makes shocking discoveries that alter our perception of events, even though we’ve seen them unfold. Quaid has the physical presence to pull off his daring escapades, including a bang-’em-up car chase that races through heavy traffic as he chases down the prime suspects. But he also has the misgivings of a man who is not quite certain he is in top form. It’s the way Quaid plays the up-and-down feelings of his character — depicted in looks and tics and nervous glances because there isn’t much time for characterization in a movie such as this — that make us feel his anxieties.

Considering that Vantage Point is set in a very big city, its biggest surprise may be the many coincidences it encompasses. Those key characters keep running into each other, even as they flee by auto or on foot through the streets. And when all that chasing is over, we’re told that what has seemed to have roared across miles and miles of city streets is only seven blocks from where it all started. Concocted it may be, yet while Vantage Point is zooming along, catching you up in its manic spell, it’s quite a wild ride.

*** 1/2Vantage Point

Starring: Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, Forest Whitaker, Bruce McGill, Edgar Ramirez, Said Taghmaoui, Ayelet Zurer, Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt.

Rated: PG-13, contains violence, profanity.

mjanuson@projo.com