False Witness

"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!)

I saw this at home on DVD, and only realized it was a TV mini-series after I checked the running time ( over 180 minutes! ). Anyway, I decided to see it in one shot, if bored I could always stop it or pause for more popcorn! I found the plot a bit of a mix of other stories' ideas, but it was well developed and ended up quite interesting. I happen to appreciate most British/Aussie movies, especially the espionage genre, where they have a way of keeping you always wondering on the next move, like a chess game. Details come and go very quickly and sometimes I was glad on having subtitles to better understand the accent...! Acting is very good as I expected from the selected cast. I guess I was tired after 3 hours, but I could hold for another half if needed!

This was the most predictable, maudlin, poorly written and constructed film I have seen in years! It has all the formulaic idiocy of a 1980s Bochco production, complete with haphazard and ridiculous shoot 'em up scenes where the "bad guys" are literally shooting their guns in the air like Pancho Villa in a '30s western, but without any of the humor or sense of fun, combined with the angst and self-absorption of an irritating self-absorbed and self-pitying teenager. In fact, I can't believe the director wasn't actually a teenage girl. There's no other way to explain such a pile of fatuous wallowing! The only aspect that was reasonably well done is the acting, but nothing could make this assemblage of unlikable characters, struggling under leaden direction and absurd script, remotely enjoyable. Hard pass.

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.

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.