The Witness Files (1999)

Lame, contrived nonsense. Don't waste your time like I did.

Most movies ask for a suspension of disbelief; this trite piece of nonsense demands that you buy into a plot full of two-dimensional cardboard characters whose actions and dialogue are so full of clichés, magical coincidences, and stereotypes that you can predict everything before it occurs -- when you aren't laughing at how bad it is. After agreeing to assist a crooked D.A. by pretending to be an eyewitness in order to convict a mobster, our heroine finds her life in peril from not only the nasty, evil mobster but also the mean old bad D.A. himself. Her apparently phenomenal talent as a make-up artiste somehow equips her to disguise herself AND to become a great actress who can fool everyone, including detectives and lawyers, AND to hatch an implausible plan to fake her own murder and frame the crooked D.A. for killing her. She tricks a rugged, honest, handsome maverick cop into unknowingly assisting her, but -- darn the luck -- they fall in love. Her "ingenious" scheme depends on various other people improbably doing, saying, and thinking exactly the things that she anticipates, and even placing themselves precisely where she wants them to be at the time she wants them there -- and miraculously, every other human being involved in this ridiculous film does just what she needs them to do. Gosh, it's almost as though it were... oh, I dunno, scripted? I watched this movie on a certain cable movie channel that caters to female viewers, and although I generally do not care for the often-derogatory term "chick flick," this movie is a BAD one. March 14, 2006

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