Page "Witness (1985 film)" Paragraph 31

Vincent Canby of the New York Times said of the film, " It's not really awful, but it's not much fun.

It's pretty to look at and it contains a number of good performances, but there is something exhausting about its neat balancing of opposing manners and values ... One might be made to care about all this if the direction by the talented Australian film maker, Peter Weir ... were less perfunctory and if the screenplay ... did not seem so strangely familiar.

One follows Witness as if touring one's old hometown, guided by an outsider who refuses to believe that one knows the territory better than he does.

There's not a character, an event or a plot twist that one hasn't anticipated long before its arrival, which gives one the feeling of waiting around for people who are always late.