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.
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.