'identity': film shall not live by one plot twist alone

By A. O. Scott

New York Times Service

Published: August 15, 2003 (Issue # 893)

For The St. Petersburg Times The presence of Cusack and Liotta isn't enough to launch "Identity" into the league of top-class thrillers.

In "Identity," a group of strangers find themselves stranded at a ramshackle motel on - how to put it? - a dark and stormy night.

Like the setting, the characters themselves have the damp, bedraggled air of cliche. There is a spoiled, has-been actress (Rebecca DeMornay), whose limo driver, a former police officer (John Cusack), has apparently driven in from a French movie, with his dark overcoat and his dog-eared copy of "Being and Nothingness."

These two are joined by a creepy desk clerk (John Hawkes), a call girl with a suitcase full of money (Amanda Peet), a nice-looking family (John C. McGinley is the dad), a desperate-seeming young couple (Clea DuVall and William Lee Scott), and a corrections officer (Ray Liotta) transporting a snaggle-toothed criminal (Jake Busey).

This is an awful lot to keep track of, especially since each of these folks seems to be carrying around a secret. Before long, though, they begin to die off, horribly, one by one, leaving the survivors and the audience to speculate about who the killer, and the next victim, might be. The desperate-seeming young wife has a vague recollection of seeing something similar in a movie once before, though she declines to cite the title, which is either "And Then There Were None" or its send-up, "Murder by Death."

"Identity," a piece of elegant directorial hackwork by James Mangold ("Girl, Interrupted," "Kate and Leopold"), goes through its generic paces with enough flair and mystery to keep you moderately entertained. The apparent premise, creaky though it may be, holds ample opportunity for suspense and second-guessing, and Mangold handles the revelations and reversals of Michael Cooney's script with nerve-racking aplomb. There are horror-film conventions - eerie sounds, slow camera movements, half-open doors and carefully arranged shadows - that retain their effectiveness no matter how many times you've seen them before, and Mr. Mangold adds to these a grisly repertory of severed heads and bloody handprints.

The second-handness of the situation, and of the characters who inhabit it, is explained - or justified, if you prefer - by an enormous, gold-plated pretzel of a plot twist that I will not divulge, lest my own head end up in someone's clothes dryer. I should note, however, that the television commercial in which Cusack is shown in conversation with Alfred Molina comes very close to spoiling the surprise, which is odd since without the surprise the movie would have no reason to exist.

Whether it has much of a reason to exist with the surprise is another question. Once it is clear you are no longer watching the movie you thought you were watching, there doesn't seem to be much point in going back to the movie that you thought you were watching, which is nonetheless what happens. Still with me? When the revelation comes - the moment that explains why all these panicky people are running around in the rain, kilometers from anywhere - it does administer a pleasurable jolt. You think: "Wow. Cool."

But the impression of cleverness, and the filmmaking dexterity that created it, fades pretty quickly, and you are left thinking: "What? Wait a minute." All of those anxious, obvious characters - and the game, earnest performances of Cusack, Peet and Hawkes, especially, suddenly lose dimension, and they did not have all that much to begin with.

"Identity" is a reasonably well-executed thriller. It suffers not from awkwardness or silliness, which would make it more fun, but rather from its air-brushed, expensive pretentiousness. Like last year's "Panic Room," the springtime box-office success of which Sony may be hoping to repeat, "Identity" is a dressed-up B picture, a hunk of cheese trying to sneak into the gourmet-food aisle of the supermarket.

The cheap grubbiness that was always the hallmark of the best horror movies, and that survives in straighforwardly exploitative pictures like the recent "Final Destination 2," is missing from preening high-concept movies like this one and the disastrous "Dreamcatcher." Mangold acquits himself much better than Lawrence Kasdan did in that nightmare, and "Identity" is not terrible by any means, but there is nonetheless something depressing about seeing so many interesting actors stuffed into such an empty, ersatz vehicle.

"Identity" is currently showing at Crystal Palace and Neo cinemas.