"Identity" toys with us for most of its compact 95-minute running time, repeatedly upending expectations based on genre conventions and marquee billing. Then, just as we're ready to walk away, it lowers the boom, not once but twice, with a lollapalooza of a twist ending.
After teasing us with the case history of a psycho who, on the eve of his execution for a motel massacre, is being transported to an insanity hearing, director James Mangold ("Cop Land," "Girl, Interrupted") sets about collecting his suspects and victims at the motel.
Cusack is a limo driver transporting a demanding Hollywood has- been (DeMornay). With them are the husband and son (John C. McGinley and Bret Loehr) of a woman (Leila Kenzle) Cusack just creamed on the highway.
Liotta is an oddly lackadaisical cop transporting a smiling convict (Jake Busey). Amanda Peet plays the world's most glamorous hooker, and Clea DuVall and William Lee Scott are newlyweds who obviously are having second thoughts.
John Hawkes ("The Perfect Storm") is the useless motel manager. He's almost as edgy and deranged-seeming as Dennis Weaver's motel manager in "Touch of Evil."
How this particular group happens to converge on this particular night is explained through interlocking flashbacks. Peet's lost high heel on the highway causes McGinley's flat tire, which causes Cusack to ram McGinley's wife, etc., etc. Once checked in, the guests begin to check out _ with detached head, multiple stab wounds, baseball bat down the gullet and so forth.
Written by England's Michael Cooney, "Identity" takes the "nothing is what it seems ..." conceit to clever new extremes. Indeed, the film's seeming flaws (back-lot generic motel) and contrivances (dead cell phones, washed-out roads) eventually work to its benefit, and have us gasping.
Even the performances benefit from being routine and obvious. Cusack starts out as a take-charge kind of guy but soon reverts to his old flustered, indecisive self. Liotta fools no one, and everyone, with his oily caricature of a cop.
Peet, who resembles Julia Roberts, is the best screamer, and DuVall, so good in "Thirteen Conversations About One Thing" and "The Slaughter Rule," sobs buckets, especially when cornered in a bathroom _ with window behind her ominously ajar. Alfred Molina ("Frida") reverts to his British accent for the psycho killer's sympathetic shrink.
Agreed. A lot to swallow in a shocker. Again, there's a good reason for this: As our minds race and sort clues, Mangold and Cooney pull a classic feint, and at least one suspect passes under our radar. And that, genre fans will be overjoyed to learn, is a fatal miscalculation that will stoke many a nightmare to come.
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