MOVIE REVIEW

Identity  (2003)

Starring: John Cusack, Ray Liotta, Amanda Peet
Director: James Mangold

Rating: R

Studio: Columbia

Review Posted: 5.3.03

Spoilers: Minor

By Sara Michelle Fetters

"Identity of Self Key to Twisty Slasher Fest"

It starts out like any other of countless serial killer movies. Ten disparate strangers meet by coincidence in a darkly secluded dilapidated hotel during a pounding midnight rainstorm. All the roads in and out are closed and the phone lines are dead. Soon, members of the group begin to die one by one in bizarrely gruesome ways, the killer leaving ingenious clues on their remains.

I’ve seen it all before time and time and time again. Identity wholeheartedly travels into Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho, Frenzy), Agatha Christie (Ten Little Indians), Claude Chabrol (Le Cérémonie, L’Enfer) and John Carpenter (Halloween) territory so blatantly that you would think they or their estates would demand compensation. So what that it is all made with incredibly talented actors and filmed with exquisite skill by a justifiably lauded independent movie director, it’s still nothing more than Friday the 13th as performed by an A-list cast.

That is, the first two thirds are. That final third is something else entirely, calling question to everything – every little frame – of what has come before. But unlike other anemic twist films like Basic, it all (mostly) clicks into place here, making Identity far more interesting than it has any right to be.

It begins with a hideous car accident on a desolate stretch of highway. A limo driver (John Cusack) – pointedly reading "Being and Nothingness" – chauffeuring a spoiled former movie star (Rebecce De Mornay) accidentally runs down a young woman (Leila Kenzle) stranded on the side of the road. Despite the protests of the whiny actress, he rushes the woman, her husband (John C. McGinley) and their silent young son (Bret Loehr) to the aforementioned hotel.

Soon, other mysterious strangers join them; a hooker (Amanda Peet) running away from her past, an angry cop (Ray Liotta) chaperoning a convicted murderer (Jake Busey), a young newlywed couple (Clea DuVall and William Lee Scott); all being booked into their rooms (one through ten, natch) by a desk clerk (John Hawkes) that would have made Norman Bates uncomfortable. But when they all start dying repugnantly, they discover they may not be the strangers all of them first thought.

Yada yada yada. No matter how good the actors are, high tight James Mangold’s (Kate & Leopold, Cop Land) direction is, how striking Phedon Papamichael’s (Moonlight Mile) cinematography is and how many times Alan Silvestri’s (The Abyss, Forrest Gump) fine score pierces and shrieks, it’s still hard to get past the high been/done that quotient of it all. It doesn’t help that everyone in the movie is playing character “types” and not actual people. Peet is the stereotypical whore with a heart of gold, Liotta is just another edgy cop with a lose rein on his emotional stability while the others fit their own specialized niche of serial killer convention.

Holding it all together is the tightly wound consternation and pensiveness of Cusack. Long one of the most under appreciated actors working in Hollywood, he’s asked to do the most by Michael Cooney’s screenplay. In fact, when the third act trickery comes on strong, it’s Cusack who’s given the responsibility of selling it to the audience. That he does this isn’t really a surprise, that he makes it so profoundly affecting is.

And that twist? It calls into question everything that’s comes before. Soon, all these character “types” I was sitting in my chair stewing and complaining about suddenly made sense, and the little moments of implausibility that were starting to add in the negative column now swung right into the positive. This is an ingenious bait and switch, and while it’s not too difficult in the end to have seen it coming, Identity was so good at lulling me into a false sense of security in regards to my own knowledge of slasher convention that I still almost missed guessing it.

Look – don’t get me wrong. Identity is not a great film, but it is an awful lot of fun. Mangold and Cooney play the Hitchcock and Chabrol cards so delicately and with such aplomb, the film is never less than watchable. In fact, most of the time, it’s utterly entertaining in a B-movie sort of way, especially with a cast filled to the brim with experts. But it’s the turn in the woods that makes it even more enjoyable and worth going back a second (and maybe even a third) time to see how it all sticks together. And while guessing the final identity of the killer reason isn’t a stretch, ultimately, it’s sure is a heck of lot of fun getting there.

Rating: 3 out of 4

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