False Witness

2009

Seasons & Episodes

  • 1

5.4| 0h30m| en
Synopsis

A British diplomat is arrested on charges of working with Russian mafia. After death threats to his wife, they are taken into protective custody. Then the MI6 shows up with a new piece of the puzzle.

Director

Producted By

New South Wales Film & Television Office

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Reviews

SoftInloveRox Horrible, fascist and poorly acted
Micah Lloyd Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.
Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.
Raymond Sierra The film may be flawed, but its message is not.
Bene Cumb This film/miniseries with quite confusing background - also known as The Diplomat in the UK and U.S., produced by Screen time Australia for the Australian subscription television channel UK.TV - is a proper thriller with mind-twisting and shooting elements, but due to length (almost 3 hours) and multilayer plot is often difficult to follow. Frequent flashbacks repeat themselves and do not provide any additional value to the general story. Behaviour of some officials is rather unrealistic and the link Russian mafia - nukes brings along several clichés and predictable ending. The cast is good, without distinguishable characters or performers though; I found Rachael Blake as Detective Chief Inspector Julie Hales the most convincing one. The series is for you if you like sophisticated spy and mob series, otherwise it is "lengthwise challenging". Even Australia has given the world more interesting thrillers, not speaking of Brits.
Johnny Utah The people who made this movie need to look up the word diplomatic immunity. The story is so full of plot holes that it makes Grand Canyon look small.The story starts out with the main character getting pulled over in custom (which is highly unlikely since he's a diplomat) Than after a few hours/days with interrogation he all of a sudden is whisked off to Australia for witness protection along with he's ex wife. From than on out its get confusing and I couldn't figure out if getting caught in custom had been the plan all a long, But what I gather was that he's involved in smuggling a nuclear bomb into Australia and he got the key that could set it off. The MI6 is involved or so it seems, I got the impression it was just two desk clerks who cooked up the idea with some wage confirmation from their superior, but that part never really get clear. It is too long and the storyline goes in too many different directions ,and it never really gets clear why he smuggled drugs in the first place. *************** Spoilers ***************spoiler *******************spoilers****** spoilers The Australian police in Sydney seem to make one mistake after another for no comprehensive reason. they gotta be the most incompetent cops I've ever seen They see the main character "steal" a phone from a nearby kid, they see him talk while he runaway from them, yet they don't question him about the phone call at all. Later as they are about to search a car dealership for the bomb, they fail to see a car that drives away just as they enter the perimeter, even tough it happens right in front of them. I also doubt the local police alone would be fit to handle a case like smuggling of a nuclear weapon, I think a higher authority would be brought inn quite early on.
wordcraft When I watched Part I of this two-part series (sight unseen, no peeking at the newspaper blurb), my immediate reaction was that it HAD to be an international co-production, since it suffers from that curious and embarrassing mannerism of nearly all productions made jointly by two (or three) national broadcasters, namely a perceived need to show countless clichéd images of the countries and cities concerned, presumably so that the Aussies can see "what London looks like" and the Brits can see how nine kinds of wonderful Sydney is.Hence the action was punctuated every few seconds with expensive helicopter footage of locations like the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the London Eye, the Sydney Opera House, Big Ben, the Gherkin, St. Paul's, Piccadilly Circus by night (have I left anyone out?) and we got no authentic sense of "place" at all, simply bleeding chunks of what some imagination-challenged advertising agency thinks tourists want to see, OUGHT to see. This approach actually seems a little pathetic and lacking in national self-confidence for a mini-series made in 2009 (and not a film from 1959), as though the show somehow still felt obliged to serve up eye-candy vignettes of the places to be at all "relevant". The British do not feel a similar need for these postcard shots when they are working alone and/or for a domestic audience, and I rather doubted the Australians would really be so gauche that they think their own grown-ups need to be treated to an open-top-bus sightseeing tour between snippets of violence or dialogue.Well... it turns out I was dead wrong about the co-production angle. It seems to be an OZ production plain and simple (and several people have mocked the wandering accents of the cast, too), sold on to UKTV, whose involvement was thus presumably only financial and not "artistic". I'm not sure what that says about the mindset of the makers (or perhaps after all they got seed-money from the NSW Tourism Development Office and other similar instances in the UK), but personally I found the tacky inserts immensely intrusive and annoying, and I couldn't help thinking that if they had spent less on them and more on the nuts & bolts of script and direction (and had even hired an actor with a smidgen of dramatic skills and no facial paralysis to play Ian Porter) they might instead have been able to create a thriller that held my attention.Still, they are definitely not the first to fall into this trap, and sure as hell they won't be the last. Unfortunately.
Venus Attack Shot in London & Australia. Ian Porter is the diplomat who got caught in the London's Scotland Yard & Russian nuclear terrorists way. Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard questioned Ian Porter for sealing the diplomatic containers that contains 23kg of heroin. He thought he's helping to counter-terrorism by acting as a middleman between the Russian mafia Krousov & the secret services so he's like the puppet being played by both teams but actually the secret services have other plans themselves. So Scotland Yard decide to whisk Ian & his estranged ex-wife, Pippa to Australia Sydney under a witness protection scheme and slowly discovered a deeper conspiracy that might kill thousands of people which Ian will have to decide who to protect. It's also about a family who lost their son & love by real life couple Dougray Scott & Claire Forlani.