'The Witness' is a Major Punishment to Watch.

After all of the hearsay praises about 'The Raid: Redemption', an Indonesian kicks action film, I easily was attracted in watching the latest from GMA Films, 'The Witness', a film that happened to involve Indonesian flavor. Yet again, I was fooled. Me and my enormous stupidity, it gets me every time. The former, from what I am hearing over some of the top critics (in the world) that I follow, was downright delicious however the latter, fact based from what I've seen, is sarcastically boring and long enough, a nausea will haunt your ass. Automatically flickering a thought to enter your mind: 'The Witness' is a major punishment to watch.

Angel (Gwen Zamora) is a beauty who decides to finally reunite with her family in Jakarta. She finds herself settled for merely three months until one night, an intruder swings his shotgun and murders everyone in her house. Angel manages to survive the sudden slaughter, but her family's intruder haunts her down for dead as she wakes up in a coma.

With a generous hiding of details, so you'd left puzzled about what "more", or if there was really "more", that you can get from this movie, it reveals why the intruder had shot Angel's family. It's kind of giving away that 'excitement' to this movie that will be rather boring than frightening.

I am new to Indonesian films--and 'The Witness', though only a collaboration between two Asian countries (an event which I am proud of, until watching the boredom film), seemed to be a bad start. I am still looking forward in getting the chance to watch 'The Raid: Redemption' so it reverts my exasperation to a hopeful fascination towards Indonesian cinema. From what I've been hearing, Indonesian filmmakers are passionate kinds, and the thriller and suspense drama can be "proof". Well, this latest is obviously not one of those.

Strikingly, the movie starts with an astonishingly violent and brutal sequence but mind you, it was at once exasperating as slo-mo appears on the screen. Tasteful cinematography by director Muhammad Yusuf, thank you very much. But as I applaud the cinematographer-slash-director, may I mention that his choice in pacing is hurtfully stupid. You don't get to leave the audience thrilled--or even fidget in little scale--when you "slow" everything down.

And no. Don't bring up the excuse of "setting the mood" because this is clearly a psychological thriller. Probably there is the repeatedly uttered saying: 'Everything has limitations' and Yusuf seemed to be setting that one aside. I agree with everything Cathy Pena had said, that this movie is merely not a Filipino film, because most of the efforts exerted were by the Indonesians. Gwen Zamora is a painfully bad actress in this one, leaving you with a fiendish thought: why won't you just kill this bee-yotch already!!

As the character of Pierre Gruno (the one who carried the film, but also escorted it to logical fallout, him and the scriptwriters), Satria, forcefully attempts to save this tripe and literally, in the film, brutally kills Angel's family in pain, the viewers will be put in pain too. "You can feel Safara's (Angel's sister) pain by simply sticking your eyes to the pit of sluggish (the movie).

Albeit it has visually stunning pieces to play, 'The Witness' is left checkmate with nowhere to go, without the discussion of how slow the pacing of its fare to that "nowhere" destination.