Bare Witness

Bare Witness
by Kelley Cauthen

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DVD Cover Information

Actor: Angie Everhart, Catalina Martone, Daniel Baldwin, Evan MacKenzie, Mark Sivertsen
Director: Kelley Cauthen
Brand: Sony
Producer: Angie Everhart
Producer: Daniel Baldwin
Producer: Jamie Elliott
Producer: Marc L. Greenberg
Producer: Ralph E. Portillo
Writer: Anthony L. Greene
Writer: Evan Spiliotopoulos
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); French (Dubbed)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DTS Surround Sound, Dubbed, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 88 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-04-23
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Sony Pictures

Movie Reviews of Bare Witness

Movie Review: Enough going on to hold some interest
Summary: 3 Stars

A stripper/porn actress/call girl (Catalina Larranaga) sets up a video camera for her session with a hit-man client (she is a free-spirit making a "documentary" about her life). The tape keeps running after his boss (a corrupt real estate developer) and a bald, stocky henchman arrive to discuss a job that night and she is kicked out of the hotel room in a bath towel. Later, the hit-man simply shows up dressed as a waiter at a dinner party for a do-gooder mayoral candidate, and fires his gun in the candidate's direction but instead wounds the city council chairman.

A plump, stubble-faced cop (Daniel Baldwin) is cooling his heels outside the fancy house, being punished for having in the past mouthed off to the mayor about him only being concerned about public relations when Baldwin's ex-partner was shot. To further establish his credentials as a crude, irreverent he-man, Baldwin's character relieves himself on some bushes. Upon hearing the gunshots, he circles the house, notices an open kitchen window, and tries but fails to catch the fleeing hit-man.

When the hit-man later remembers about the camera (for some reason he let the hooker set it up), and tells his boss about it and that it is now gone, the boss's slinky hellcat henchwoman (Laurin Reina) shoots him to death. The boss visits the set of a sleazy movie being produced by fat slob "Slim," who sometimes uses the hooker in his films. She soon arrives, dropped off by her concerned roommate, Angie Everhart. Everhart's character also has a checkered past but now works as a bartender. Claiming to be a film producer, the boss escorts the woman out a back door and later dumps her dead body.

Baldwin, in clumsy, cynical-acting overdrive, pointlessly gives Everhart a hard time in the police interrogation room. For no apparent reason, his attitude completely changes to a softy when he takes her home. In some awkward scenes, the two become romantically involved, as she falls into danger from Reina and the stocky henchman, who are searching for the missing tape.

Along the way, Reina secretly goes free-lance, tired of her boss "abusing" her (the film throws in a "rough sex" scene). She now tries to find the tape to use it against him. After attempting to lure Slim into helping her find it, only to have him threaten to tell her boss (who he is already trying to blackmail over the boss's presence at the adult film set), she blows Slim away.

Conveniently, a neighbor's question clues in Everhart that her dead roommate had taken her VCR to a repair shop with a tape stuck in it. Everhart recovers the VCR and the tape. But just as she is watching it, Reina and the stocky henchman loudly approach the house where she is staying, and, after a seemingly endless chase by car and on foot, abduct her (but not before she slips the tape to a bystander who passes it along to Baldwin).

Baldwin watches and re-watches the tape, to catch a critical part (which is never made clear to the audience) about who the intended target was. Baldwin has also learned that the real estate developer wants a highway built to a casino project in the desert and has made enormous campaign contributions to both the incumbent and the challenger (why would the reform-minded challenger accept the dirty money?)

In the film's climax, Baldwin takes Reina up on her phoned-in offer to swap the tape for Everhart, who has "made a deal" with her (but what about the stocky henchman?). They rush to the scene of a victory dinner for the mayoral challenger and foil a clumsy attempt on her life by the developer himself, with the henchman back in tow with him. It turns out that the city council chairman was in the developer's pocket and would become mayor when the mayor-elect died. Baldwin and Everhart merely shrug as Reina runs scot-free over to a CNN news crew to sell the tape.

It is amazing that this movie still manages to be enjoyable with so many problems. The cast is a bunch of unknowns, and the title, acting, and story are lame. Baldwin is not cut out for the role of a rugged, romantic leading man. He seems to jump in and out of trying to play a character and mostly ends up acting as if he had been hauled in off the street to play himself. He comes across best as a messy, soft-spoken guy with some problems. His romance with Everhart is rushed and implausible. Her performance skates on the surface of a thin role. With a line-delivery that sometimes seems to miss a beat, she tries a little too hard to be serious and purposeful. But, given how she was marketed, I was more impressed with her seriousness than with her plainer-than-expected looks. A feisty female detective is okay, but Willie Gault is a total dud as Baldwin's partner.

The other characters, including Baldwin's gruff chief, are bland or exaggerated cardboard cut-outs. The bad-guy land developer acts like a big-shot but never does anything smart. His murder plot is based on a skimmed-over, clich? motive and is confusing and sloppy (he arranges either to make or fake an attempt on the challenger's life before she has even won; it is unclear whether shooting the councilman was even intended). The plan serves only to put the police on notice that she is a target, and the payoff is simply and unbelievably luring her out of a dinner party alone with a cell phone call for him to pull the trigger on her himself. He seems clueless in the tape search and about Reina's scheming.

As the henchwoman, Reina is sexy and spirited enough to be fun to watch. But to suggest, as one review does, that simply because, without explanation, the movie lets her get away clean with known, multiple murders, kidnapping, assault, and robbery, that this is some sort of profound statement about life, rather than just flip, half-baked writing, is straining to find meaning in all the wrong places. Whether or not something "happens a lot in real life" does not, as the review assumes, automatically make it meaningful, interesting, entertaining, or credible when made the subject of a particular work of fiction.

Despite all of the problems, there are enough threads to the story, and enough colorful caricatures on the make on the wild side, to hold some interest. Because of the involved plot, and because Baldwin, Everhart, and Larranaga make likable enough "good guys" to root for against the various "bad guys," the clumsy weaknesses can more easily be taken in stride as something fun to laugh at. As I see it, this is an above-average, 2 1/2-star entry in a low-budget, formulaic, exploitation genre.

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Summary of Bare Witness

Julie spencer likes her work as an adult film actress and call girl. She especially likes watching the videotapes she makes of herself and her clients. When she turns up dead her roommate carly first becomes a suspect then an intended victim. Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 08/31/2004 Starring: Angie Everhart Daniel Baldwin Run time: 79 minutes Rating: R Director: Kelley Cauthen

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