Larger text
Smaller text
Print
E-mail
'Identity' is a thrill ride, although the road is a bit bumpy
Amanda Peet and John Cusack star in the thriller 'Identity'
Columbia Pictures
Director: James Mangold.
Stars: John Cusack, Ray Liotta, Rebecca De Mornay.
MPAA rating: R, for strong violence and language.
The intense "Identity," which has such aspirations, grabs you from the first and shakes you repeatedly. It's a whirlpool of a movie that circles menacingly around a group of people, most of them strangers to each other, who are isolated during a storm at a dilapidated motel.
The actors are just distinctive enough to hold you to the finish, such as it is. With a lot of help from Alan Silvestri's unsettling score and James Mangold's tightly wound staging, "Identity" assures that everyone will stick around for a solution while making one obvious, semi-correct deduction.
But fair? Logical? Remotely plausible? A very high percentage of the audience will reach the conclusion muttering, "excuse me?" The rest were dead on arrival, which is to say, predisposed to accept any outcome as long as the movie held their attention.
For a while, "Identity" seems neatly constructed.
Using a slightly juxtaposed arrangement of scenes during the first 20 minutes, screenwriter Michael Cooney doubles back again and again from different perspectives to the chain reaction of events that prompt several characters to converge on the motel run by Larry (John Hawkes).
The sympathetic George (John C. McGinley) arrives with his seriously injured wife, Alice (Leila Kenzle), and his cherubic, stoic stepson Tim (Bret Loehr).
To help the desperate family, a chauffeur named Ed (John Cusack) ignores the selfish ranting of actress-employer Caroline (Rebecca De Mornay).
Plainclothes cop Rhodes (Ray Liotta) swings by with dangerous prisoner Robert (Jake Busey).
Explosive newlywed Lou (William Lee Scott) rattles everyone including pregnant bride Ginny (Clea Du Vall).
Paris (Amanda Peet) might be a prostitute as her attire suggests.
Occasionally, we cut to a night-before-the-execution hearing for convicted mass murderer Malcolm Rivers (Pruitt Taylor Vince), where a psychiatrist (Alfred Molina) interprets Malcolm's newly found diary.
For a while, Cooney's screenplay evinces the influence of Agatha Christie's "10 Little Indians," also filmed as "And Then There Were None." But then "Identity" suggests he's more influenced by a thousand ripoffs such as the "Friday the 13th" and "Scream" series that collect brain-dead teens and dispatch them one by one.
The question is whether the solution will satisfy or provoke moviegoers, who will be sent home reeling from an explanation that is somewhere to the left of hokey and to the right of impossible.
Some - far fewer than for the shrewd and touching "Sixth Sense" - will be tantalized enough to watch "Identity" a second time to see how they were fooled and to judge whether there were even 10 legitimate minutes in the telling.
Or whether none of that matters when getting there is fun enough.
