Aidan Quinn is always good and his films are always interesting, no matter what kind of role he plays. Here he is a very ordinary man, a common restaurateur down town in New York, who has the bad luck of happening to witness a cold blooded murder next to him. The murderer passes him on his way out and smiles towards him. That smile is the nightmare of the film and of Aidan Quinn's character. He has a wife and a small boy, whom he loves, they are a tender family, but as he is called to testify about the murder as the perfect witness, his family becomes threatened, and he refuses to testify to protect them. The district attorney has to find other ways to bring in the mob that keeps the neighbourhood in iron pincers, he tries any means to get Quinn to testify, but he stubbornly refuses and even goes to jail for contempt. Meanwhile the casualties pile up in the jam of this unresolved case, and the murderer keeps smiling, paying everyone off who keeps their silence, until it goes too far. It's a typical mob story, this is how it works, when something happens everyone turns his back to it and no one has seen anything, and the most horrible scene is the preliminary murder scene. The smiling murderer shoots down his victim with repeated shots while all the customers of the joint just turn their backs seeing nothing. This finally gets up to Quinn's neck, and there is an unexpected final settlement. The expert witness has done his duty by actually doing nothing, the nightmare is over, but the casualties remain behind as silent but the most eloquent and irrefutable witnesses of all.
