False Witness

24 January 2009. This long and more intellectually convoluted espionage television mini-series incorporates the strong European tradition of subdued mystery and moral angst that skews the more uplifting, positive energy of American action-thrillers. The script and special camera work overreach themselves in their attempt to be smart and intriguing, though a careful read will reveal a rather irritating editing and irregular flow of the storyline with a number of gaps in the plot continuity. There is a heavy dose of emotional guilt and suffering, strangely analogous to Eastern cultural humble and suffering sacrifice philosophies. The TV series never quite reaches the potential for really potent enlightening, though it does mightily in its effort to push those notes of inspiration. A hard movie to sit through, The Diplomat though still presents a qualitatively superior substantive performance.

After reading some so-so reviews, I wasn't' expecting too much. However, my wife and I thought it was suspenseful and well acted. We thoroughly enjoyed it.

"False Witness" is an enjoyable enough espionage mini-series which easily kept me watching for more than three hours in two sessions on Australian cable TV on the second weekend in January 2009 in what was claimed to be a "World Premiere". There's probably very little in it that you haven't seen before though the degree of culpability of the main character Ian Porter (Dougray Scott) had me guessing for a long time.

I thought this was a co-production between Australian pay-TV company Foxtel and British TV (BBC?) but apparently it's all-Aussie. The action takes place in London and Sydney and in case you're not sure where we are, every time the location changes we start with a shot of Tower Bridge, the London Eye, Big Ben etc or alternatively Sydney Harbour Bridge or the Opera House. (Incidentally, according to "False Witness" every resident of Sydney has a harbor view).

Real-life couple Dougray Scott and Claire Forlani are a great-looking pair, Clare especially is a stunning-looking young woman. Unfortunately on this evidence Dougray is something of a sleepwalker.

I don't think I need to explain the plot again as Venus Attack has covered it well but I suspect the couple whose marriage fails after they lose a child in an accident has been done before.

(The broadcast I watched had sub-titles (which I find helpful) in the second episode but not the first!)

When I watched Part I of this two-part series (sight unseen, no peeking at the newspaper blurb), my immediate reaction was that it HAD to be an international co-production, since it suffers from that curious and embarrassing mannerism of nearly all productions made jointly by two (or three) national broadcasters, namely a perceived need to show countless clichéd images of the countries and cities concerned, presumably so that the Aussies can see "what London looks like" and the Brits can see how nine kinds of wonderful Sydney is.

Hence the action was punctuated every few seconds with expensive helicopter footage of locations like the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the London Eye, the Sydney Opera House, Big Ben, the Gherkin, St. Paul's, Piccadilly Circus by night (have I left anyone out?) and we got no authentic sense of "place" at all, simply bleeding chunks of what some imagination-challenged advertising agency thinks tourists want to see, OUGHT to see.

This approach actually seems a little pathetic and lacking in national self-confidence for a mini-series made in 2009 (and not a film from 1959), as though the show somehow still felt obliged to serve up eye-candy vignettes of the places to be at all "relevant".

The British do not feel a similar need for these postcard shots when they are working alone and/or for a domestic audience, and I rather doubted the Australians would really be so gauche that they think their own grown-ups need to be treated to an open-top-bus sightseeing tour between snippets of violence or dialogue.

Well... it turns out I was dead wrong about the co-production angle. It seems to be an OZ production plain and simple (and several people have mocked the wandering accents of the cast, too), sold on to UKTV, whose involvement was thus presumably only financial and not "artistic".

I'm not sure what that says about the mindset of the makers (or perhaps after all they got seed-money from the NSW Tourism Development Office and other similar instances in the UK), but personally I found the tacky inserts immensely intrusive and annoying, and I couldn't help thinking that if they had spent less on them and more on the nuts & bolts of script and direction (and had even hired an actor with a smidgen of dramatic skills and no facial paralysis to play Ian Porter) they might instead have been able to create a thriller that held my attention.

Still, they are definitely not the first to fall into this trap, and sure as hell they won't be the last. Unfortunately.

This film/miniseries with quite confusing background - also known as The Diplomat in the UK and U.S., produced by Screen time Australia for the Australian subscription television channel UK.TV - is a proper thriller with mind-twisting and shooting elements, but due to length (almost 3 hours) and multilayer plot is often difficult to follow. Frequent flashbacks repeat themselves and do not provide any additional value to the general story. Behaviour of some officials is rather unrealistic and the link Russian mafia - nukes brings along several clichés and predictable ending. The cast is good, without distinguishable characters or performers though; I found Rachael Blake as Detective Chief Inspector Julie Hales the most convincing one.

The series is for you if you like sophisticated spy and mob series, otherwise it is "lengthwise challenging". Even Australia has given the world more interesting thrillers, not speaking of Brits.