|
Alfred Hitchcock: "It's just me, spinning in my grave at forty RPMs. Don't mind me -- get back to watching the trailer for Identity." And so I did, against my better judgment. Identity seems to be your typical "bunch of people from all walks of life find themselves stuck in a remote location and get picked off one by one" kind of thriller, except with one crucial difference: it isn't very good. From the trailer alone, we get so many plot contrivances and needlessly opaque twists that I'm left wondering how the feature-length version will be able to fulfill the promise of ninety solid minutes of such contrivances and twists. At some point, the film must just cave in on itself, leaving only a large hole in the theater canvas. Our heroes -- a fragrant potpourri of B-level talent, most of whom you'll recognize for their performances as "Cop #2" and "Shaky Addict #3" in other superior films -- are lured to an old motel in the middle of a thunderstorm, through suspiciously coincidental circumstances. Once there, someone (or thing!) goes B-movie actor hunting. Luckily, being B-movie actors, they're all used to getting killed off well before the end of a film, and take it with grace and stride on their way to the on-set catering spread. Among the coincidences presented: a husband and wife get into a car crash, forcing the husband to take his injured wife directly to a creepy old motel, where he knows she will get the quality medical attention only low-tier Motel 6s can provide. Elsewhere, hardened cop Ray Liotta, en route to transporting a dangerous criminal to jail, decides to cruise into the creepy old motel and cool his barking dogs, forcing the murderer to "pinky swear" he won't kill anyone when Liotta sends him out to get more ice. Still elsewhere, a sopping wet John Cusack stops to pick up a mini-skirted super-hottie whose car has stalled, and is "forced" to pull into a motel with her because the road they are driving on, it is explained, is a dead end. (Does this happen often on the interstate? I suppose in a strictly philosophical sense, all roads end somewhere. I just wasn't aware they all ended in the parking lot of a creepy Motel 6.) Since the mini-skirted super-hottie falls for the old "This road dead-ends, let's shack up in a motel" line, I sincerely hope Cusack also tried his luck with that other old sawhorse, "All the hallways to other rooms dead-end, we'll have to share a bed."
Once at the creepy motel, Cusack and super-hottie join our gang of heroes, all of them victims of the winds of fate -- and not, we are asked to be charitable in believing, their own ridiculously poor choices up to this point. "Accidents seem to have a purpose," the trailer states, while our large cast gets down to the business of wandering off one by one and getting murdered. We are asked to assume that these coincidences (the coincidence being that this many people would spend the night in a Motel 6, I suppose) are more than they appear. This would mean someone has set everything up so that a thunderstorm hits, cars stall, roads dead-end, and John Cusack picks up a sensational piece of ass. So, our suspect list is either a) John Cusack, or b) God. Adding another fresh layer of confusion, the entire montage is narrated by John Cusack, our lone survivor, while being interrogated. This leaves open an entirely new path of speculation, wherein Cusack is simply bullshitting the police with a far-fetched story, a la The Usual Suspects. Maybe the girl he actually picked up was dressed tastefully, and looked more like a librarian than, as he puts forward, a shameless and insatiable underwear model. Maybe he just killed them all. The trailer certainly wants us to entertain this as a possibility. I refuse on the grounds of immeasurable apathy. As for the underwear model herself, I have no idea who she is, but she has the worst American accent I've ever heard. Her two speaking lines in the trailer, "It's a dead end" and "I'm not staying here, are you out of your mind?" sound like lines spoken by a British actress attempting to master, unsuccessfully, an American patois. Actually, now that I look at the trailer again, these lines might have been spoken by two entirely different actresses. Good lord. Well, maybe they served peanut butter at the on-set catering.
Eventually our heroes divine that they all have the same birthday. "Yeah," says Cusack suspiciously, like this explains anything at all. They also seem to arrive at the birthday conclusion unerringly quickly. If I were in a room with total strangers trying to work out why we were all being killed, my initial lines of questioning would be "Is anyone here in a Witness Protection Program?" or "Anybody spit in the hair of a murderer recently?" with "So who's getting some presents this week?" a far distant second place. The puzzling onslaught of birthday boys and girls, number nines, sudden deaths, rain, and poorly decorated Motel 6 rooms continues, presumably to entice us to watch the film and figure how any of this makes sense. I do admit a little curiosity to have it explained, but I suspect I'd much rather just pump information off anybody I know who was unlucky enough to see it. Maybe over dinner. "So, you saw Identity last weekend, huh?" "Man. Yeah. Jesus." "What was the deal with all the nines and murders and birthdays?" "Oh, that. John Cusack was the killer. He was a schizophrenic who couldn't remember killing anyone. It turned out everyone there didn't show up for his ninth birthday party." "Ah. Gotcha. Catch the Leafs game last night?"
RATING:
  |
Wait,
do you hear something? Kind of a whirring sound?
(A
small note on the ever-damp John Cusack: I have yet to see this man
in a film where he isn't emoting in the rain. Is it in his contract or something? I am eager for the Cusack
movie where, in the middle of some heartfelt rain-soaked entreaty to
get back together with the girl he wronged, he simply collapses dead
from pneumonia.)
Our
heroes congregate and try to sort out why they're being murdered -- even
though, given some of their past roles, this would seem immediately obvious.
Throughout, the audience is given repeated shots of the number nine,
which even a spaniel could divine must be significant in some way. At
one point, a slammed motel door jars the number six attached to it,
and it swings downward on the screw, revealing a nine. Given the implications
usually given to the number six in horror films, this scene only gave
me a placating effect, as if the director were attempting to make things
less scary. It is much like if a slammed door with a Satanic-looking pentagram on it
shook loose some screws and swung downward to reveal a pretty star.