"Vantage Point," with Richard T. Jones (left) and Dennis Quaid, offers an interesting concept that fails in its execution. (AP Photo/Columbia Pictures, Daniel Daza)

If it looks familiar, it is.

On the eve of a historic treaty with the Arab nations, the president is set to make the biggest speech of his life.

But his speech ends before it begins, courtesy of an assassin's bullet.

Then it happens again. And again. And again.

Is it a terror plot? A broken projector? No, it's "Vantage Point," the year's most repetitive thriller that will have you begging for it to end. The plot is unnecessarily dense and complex for what it ultimately is, which is a tepid action film.

We're led through a convoluted, jumbled maze of what happened and who did what and where they're going and what their ultimate plan is.

But we don't actually get answers to all of those questions.

The main thread involves a Secret Service agent (Dennis Quaid) returning to duty after taking a bullet for the president (William Hurt) a year before. His partner (Matthew Fox) seems worried about him, but he's given the ball with the game on the line, so to speak.

So the president is shot, then an explosion rocks the courtyard.

A Spanish police officer leaps on the podium, all while the world watches on "GNN" and a man in the crowd (Forest Whitaker) captures everything on his camcorder.

Then we rewind (literally) and start over from the perspective of Quaid's Secret Service agent. And again from Whitaker's point of view. And the president's. And the Spanish cop's. And a little girl who dropped her ice cream on Whitaker.

And once the repetitions are sewn up (and the little girl grossly violates the film's gimmick by shifting point of view repeatedly), the whole affair becomes a Michael Bay movie, with car chases and shootouts and slo-mo close-up pans of Quaid gazing off in the distance.

You gotta give style points for the idea, which is intriguing, but it fails with its insistence of replaying the same events from just a slightly different angle.

If each person had seen the same event differently, it could have been interesting. Instead it's groan-inducing and frustrating.

It also has a flair for the twisty plot, with characters not dying and betraying others, which isn't a bad thing necessarily, though they're thrown about in a predictable and haphazard manner.

The film's climactic chase is done well, though it's totally misplaced in a film like this, which should be about ideas and perspective, not gunfights and car wrecks. Ultimately, the film is about Quaid's character and his retribution in overcoming the trauma of taking that bullet. But it gets lost in a blur of bullets, twisted metal and a broken plot.