User Reviews

This looked like it was some sort of straight-to-video piece of junk, but it turns out to be a well-written thriller with very good production values. The plot is a bit over-the-top, but palatable. Spader and Daniels do a great job, while di Rossi is at least tolerable.

If you have to have justice and happy endings, this movie is probably not for you.

*****MAJOR SPOILER*****

The only problem I had in watching this film was that one of the critical turning points in the movie (you'll know when you get there) made me think of the Saturday Night Live sketch about The Pepsi Syndrome. In the movie, this is supposed to be a very serious flashback essential to solving the mystery, but all I could think about was Dan Aykroyd standing around as President Carter and Garrett Morris dressed in drag mopping up contaminated coolant. It makes me smile even thinking about it after finishing the movie.

*****END SPOILER*****

If you liked Traffic and political thrillers, you will probably enjoy this movie.

Actually, this is a pretty good film with a stupid title. "I Witness." I'm exhausted by the plethora of dumb movies that misspell words or substitute numbers for letters in the title. "Se7en" was well above average for the serial murder genre -- but whoever dreamed up such a sleazy title? Who were they aiming for? Teen agers of the sort that believe the chief language of Latin America is Latin? Anyway, Jeff Daniels, always a passive actor, is an idealistic human rights worker who is sent to Tijuana to look into the mass murder of a couple of dozen poor workers who were buried in a cave. James Spader, in a strictly secondary role, and his girl friend, Portia DeRossi, are on a similar mission but they work for the American corporation on whose property the murders took place.

There is an honest Mexican cop on the job too, Clifton Collins, Jr., whose help is only reluctantly offered at first. After some initially edgy encounters, Daniels and Collins more or less become colleagues and Collins begins to fill Daniels in on how things work around here. There is the bad Mexican cop too, Jordi Caballero. He doesn't conform to Latino stereotype number one -- short, fat, and greasy. He conforms to Latino stereotype number two -- tall, elegant, style haired, and greasy.

The plot gets a bit complicated and I don't think I want to push the reveals too far. Let's just say that this film doesn't use the current controversy concerning illegal immigration and drug smuggling as an opportunity to smear the country as a whole.

In fact, the instigators of the crimes turn out to be less exotic than that. It's no more insulting to Latinos than it is to gringos. The treatment of the problem resembles that which we witnessed in "Traffic," which is a better movie all around.

"I Witness" is more traditional than "Traffic." There was a central social problem addressed in "Traffic," namely hard drugs. There was no mystery about it. It was the problem that wove all the narrative threads together. Here, the problem is a mystery to be solved, giving the movie a more traditional, who-dunnit cast. Everything about this effort is more familiar. The man on his deathbed, expiring from the same chemical agent to which he's exposed others, confessing to his priest to clear his soul and his conscience. The hoodlums and cholos holding their pistols sideways even in the midst of a fire fight. I mean, who permits such egregious crap to stay in the film? The director, I guess.

In the end, the bad guys are all rounded up and carted off, at the expense of a couple of valuable lives. Very emotionally satisfying but I'll bet that in real life the bad guys would have been replace by other bad guys and that the bad guys are in charge as we ponder the problems raised by corruption and greed, in both international business and international politics.

If I've been a little harsh on the movie it's because it barely missed an opportunity to be very good indeed, torpedoed by slack direction and a slightly pandering and raggedy script. But, as it is, it's still a notch above most of the abject basura that has shown up on our screens lately.

In Tijuana, dozens of innocent people are murdered, and the police are bent on blaming the local drug cartel. A human rights activist, played by Jeff Daniels, originally sent to monitor a union vote at an American-owned company, begins investigating the murders. He soon learns that the drug lord is a harmless, lovable fuzzball trying to earn an honest living. Meanwhile, the American company, trying to keep their business from becoming unionized, ends up at the center of the investigation in typical Hollywood sucker-punch style.

Yes, it's an interesting plot, but Hollywood is really good at inserting its Anti-American bias into an otherwise perfectly good modern murder mystery.

I Witness is an overly earnest little film about politics, drugs and mass murder on the U.S./Mexico border. The basic idea of the story isn't that bad, but it was realized with too many characters, too little mystery and an ending where you can pinpoint the exact moment when these filmmakers decided to stop caring whether the movie made any sense or not.

James Rhodes (Jeff Daniels) is a human rights activist who's been sent down to observe a vote to unionize at an American-owned chemical company in Tijuana. While he's there, Rhodes gets involved in the investigation of 27 dead Mexican peasants founds in a drug smuggling tunnel. The authorities want to blame it on a enigmatic drug lord, but Rhodes suspects there's something else going on. His search for answers is assisted by the prideful Detective Castillo (Clifton Collins Jr.) and his work with the unionization vote is complicated by pretty U.S. trade representative Emily Thomas (Portia de Rossi). There's also a U.S. State Department official named Douglas Draper (James Spader) who is an old friend of Rhodes. I think Draper was intended to be a significant character in this film, but he really just floats around and gives off that vibe that James Spader gave off when he was thin. As opposed to the vibe Spader has given off since he got fat. There aren't many actors whose on screen presence has changed so greatly over the course of their career. I really hope CGI reaches the point one day where thin Spader from Sex, Lies & Videotape can do a buddy cop movie with fat Spader from Boston Legal.

Anyway…Rhodes just sort of wanders around from place to place, getting abducted by drug gangsters and pointedly NOT having sex with Emily, until a guy on his death bed explains the whole story to him. I don't want to give away the ending but let me just note, the moment when drug gangsters storm in like the cavalry to rescue Rhodes, even though there's absolutely no way they could know he needed rescuing and absolutely no reason they should rescue him in the first place, that's the moment when you know these filmmakers no longer care if I Witness makes any sense.

Honestly, this isn't a horrendous film. Jeff Daniels is a perfectly acceptable hero, though he does look far too much like Jeff Bridges from the 1976 King Kong remake. The script is making a noble effort at saying something about the complexities of life, death and business on the U.S./Mexico border. I suppose the direction is adequate. But a paucity of plot, a phalanx of unnecessary characters and a plethora of poorly written scenes does produce a pedestrianly bad movie.

First of all, one of the problems with a largely peer-generated site like IMDb that apparently lacks ANY consistent or reasonable oversight along the lines of what Wikipedia does is that some non-native English speaker blow-hard with unlimited time on his hands is allowed to post nearly HALF of the plot summaries on IMDb, more often than not getting key details WRONG, most likely because 1)he lacks the linguistic and cultural proficiency to understand what's going on in the movie, and 2)he's either a large group of beer buddies accessing the site under a single name, OR he's fast-forwarding through these films so he can write about 25 movie summaries per day. Either way, it greatly cheapens IMDb.

I WITNESS is a case in point. This individual, and the other over-raters who have commented previously here are like those who would vote for a president just because the candidate shares their skin color (and the U.S. is the ONLY non-African democracy in world history to elect a leader of historical African descent). I WITNESS is an action\thriller where the action is gratuitous and mostly off-screen, and the supposed "thrills" are too lame and predicable to really qualify as such. Perhaps the biggest problem occurs in the dual openings, as the second prologue is TOTALLY ILLOGICAL and serves only to clutter, muddle, and dilute any quality, verisimilitude, or suspense to which the filmmakers may have aspired. After dumping drums of toxic waste in a deserted Mexican creek, Tijuana factory manager Roy Logan (Wade Andrew Williams) and his implausible newly-hired "moonlighting" drug cartel hit-man Bolo (Ricardo Alvarez) would have had NO reason to wait around and see if any slumming San Diego BMX riders would show up to wrestle in their toxic plume. And even if they DID see distant by-standers being contaminated by a substance that took HOURS to produce symptoms, they would have high-tailed it out of there and NOT gunned down obviously up-scale American teen boys (their SUREST way of attracting unwanted attention) when the boys NEVER would have been able to connect their possible future injury to the polluting pair. This ill-thought sub-plot (and the presence of a searching father--Mr. Carter (Mark Carlton)--portrayed by a bozo who has less acting ability than a jumping bean) is not only unnecessary, but it serves merely to pad a movie that feels like rejected made-for-TV fare. No wonder it took the distributor FOUR YEARS after its DVD release to bamboozle the major U.S. video providers into offering I WITNESS, in a crass attempt to capitalize on 2007's "open borders" hysteria.

Finally - an action/thriller flick that rocked me with a bona fide mystery! I hate "spoiler" reviews so I can't get into too much story. Needless to say, it's a top notch thinking man's action film. Jeff Daniels plays a Human Rights Watch type whose been demoted and sent to Tijuana because he punched out a journalist. This ain't no Greenpeace bleeding heart. He is one p***ed off and tortured tough son of a bitch. But Daniels never swaggers. He plays it with such subtlety and finesse, you know you're witnessing the kind of performance only given by actors who have the trust and confidence in their skills borne of years of experience. Clifton Collins is a Mexican homicide detective afflicted with the job of aiding Daniels in his investigation of a peasant massacre on the US/Mexican border. Collins has the same temperature of Latin fire as Al Pacino. His characterization is so convincing, it didn't even dawn on me until I saw the credits that this is the same actor who played Frankie Flowers the gay, sadistic assassin in "Traffic." He is an entirely different being - a star to watch. Spader mesmerizes by virtue of his edgy intelligence. He can ask for a drink of water and you are compelled to wonder about what he really wants. Portia De Rossi gives a gutsy performance as Daniels US government adversary, though it took me a while to get used to her playing a true hard ass. No Ally McBeal here.

The writing was first rate. Maybe the bottom line best thing about the movie. I don't know who the writing team is - Colin Green and Robert Ozn - they don't have any other credits - I looked them up on imdb. It's kind of the best of old-school, 70s writing meets 21st century dialogue and pacing. I could picture these guys writing "The French Connection" as well as "Desperado." I do wonder, though, if the Ozn part of the team is the same (or related?) Ozn from the band Ebn-Ozn.

It's by far the best thing Rowdy Herrington's ever directed. Miles above his Bruce Willis action flick - can't remember the name off the top of my head. He's very good with street action, makes it ring true without any tricks, never amping you up with manipulations or pyrotechnics. There's a moment where a union activist gets knee-capped, and I could feel the hammer drop.

Cinematography and production values are filled with foreboding and dark secrets. At times, it's almost claustrophobic and creepy and then suddenly - there's sunlight.

The only thing I'll give a 'fair' grade to was the music. It was sound design styled synth stuff, and for a film set in Tijuana, it didn't work for me. It wasn't bad, just the wrong color.

I won't write about the contents, others did that already - I'll write about the setting of the movie.

I was very pleased to find a US movie dealing with multinational corporations, unions, murder, police crime and environmental pollution in the form of a crime mystery that really works. This, I mainly attribute to the well balanced way everything was handled: Multinational corporations pay very low wages, but on the other hand, without them there might be even less jobs in developing countries. Trade unions help workers to more rights and higher wages, but on the other hand the multinationals just move on when the wages rise, etc. pp. OK, drug lords and crime play a big part in this movie, too - but I am glad these things are not depicted as being cool or glitzy, like in other movies. What I don't understand is the IMDb label 'Thriller' - the German word 'Krimi' (crime movie) seems to fit better. And like some German crime movies, the crime is only used as a vehicle for all the other trials and tribulations happening to the characters.

Watching all the street scenes and how people like the human rights guy might actual live in Mexican cities (where being abducted seems to be an almost daily experience) was much more believable and 'real' like, for instance, in 'Man on Fire'. Thumbs up for that.

To find such a multi-layered view of things makes watching this movie a pleasure - although the topic is very sad. Unfortunately this was a straight to pay TV/video release in Germany, so not many people will have the chance to watch it.

The only thing I missed was a real motive for the one shown as being responsible in the end. Maybe watching it a second time might help here.

All bad things that happens in Latin America is because the drugs dealers right? Wrong. This is what this movie is about. As a Latin American I saw a different point of view at this movie, something that is rare when the subject are "the third world countries". Usually Hollywood shows Latin America as poor, full of drug dealers, violence and ignorance. This movie shows the poor Latin America but starts to escape of stereotypes during the story, at certain point we discover that was not the drug cartel the responsible for the murderers but the police, what is a big difference compared with other movies that uses the same subject. This is what I most like in this movie, it shows that not everything that causes problems to the "third world" comes from drugs, some of the problems are sometimes caused by the big non-Latin American corporations and corrupted police.