Eyewitness

Vietnam war hero and Manhattan janitor Daryll Deever (William Hurt) is obsessed with hard-nosed TV reporter Tony Sokolow (Sigourney Weaver). A shady Vietnamese businessman is murdered in his office building. He was complaining about Daryll's racist fellow vet coworker Aldo (James Woods). Aldo has an alibi in Daryll's girlfriend and Aldo's sister Linda (Pamela Reed). It's a lie and he's come into a lot of money. Tony investigates the story and concentrates on Daryll who secretly found the body and pretends to know something to stay close to her. Her Jewish activist boyfriend Joseph (Christopher Plummer) is hiding a secret. Police detectives Lt. Jacobs (Steven Hill) and Lt. Black (Morgan Freeman) are investigating. Mysterious Vietnamese men are watching.

There are some great actors in this. I checked this out despite never heard of it. It has lots of interesting bits. This would work better with a creepier Hurt. He's very capable and his obsession starts that way. I think Linda gets into the way and she's not a necessary character. There are little disjointed and oddly superfluous moments like his dog attacking. Then the movie takes a really outlandish turn. It's too bad because this could have been a solid simple thriller. The turn ties together two parts of the story that really has no connection to each other. It becomes flat at that point.

There is a murder without an apparent motive, so the viewer is in the dark for over half the film. When someone is killed without the audience being involved with the "why", interest quickly wains. Such is the case with "Eyewitness". Despite totally acceptable acting from a terrific cast, the film seems slow and constantly bogging down in blind alley subplots. When the motive for the murder is finally revealed, it almost seems like it comes out of a different movie, having little to do with what precedes it. William Hurt is very good as the mild mannered janitor with a crush on television news reporter Sigourney Weaver. Christopher Plummer is very effective in bad guy roles such as here, or in films like "The Silent Partner". James Woods plays James Woods, which is always interesting. Overall though, things never come together, due mainly to the muddled script. - MERK

Slightly offbeat murder yarn dealing with a pair of misfits who become involved in a murder which had nothing to do with either of them. This causes one of them to be targeted by an assassin who is involved in a love triangle between a woman and his intended victim. Strange film with a taut ending.

William Hurt stars as the brooding janitor in this sub-Hitchcockian thriller directed by Peter Yates (Bullitt). No-one in the film is quite what they seem, and Hurt plays the role of ambivalent hero/anti hero intelligently. Sigourney Weaver shows what a fine actress she really is whilst Christopher Plummer adds gravitas to the proceedings. Like Benton's Still Of The Night the film is well-crafted and often intriguing. Definitely well worth watching.

For weeks I have been looking for the perfect structure of a screenplay. This film had me in the first ten minutes because of what it set itself up to be. The structure had the camera following one principle lead, going off to meet the other principle lead, who would subsequently go off to meet the character from which the major plot developed. "Eyewitness" is a great film which showed me what I have been missing throughout my entire movie-watching career. After you meet the principle characters through following them, some kind of sub-plot, or major plot, or principle theme, will develop, and it will truly free up the entire movie. This is basically the structure of almost every independent film I have seen. Not to be missed.