Identity

Identity is well-acted, competently directed, has an original idea at its heart and a surprising twist at the end. Unfortunately, it just happens to be complete bollocks as well.

I don't want to be too rude about the film, because it tries quite hard and giving it the sort of treatment I gave to Paycheck would be like kicking a puppy. It's trying so hard to be a good film and the writer and director have clearly filled several notebooks while watching The Usual Suspects repeatedly, its just that it fails to achieve. But then, it's better to fail spectacularly rather than succeed miserably, I suppose.

I think the main problem comes from the structuring of the movie. As I said, the director and writer have clearly watched Usual Suspects a few too many times and borrowed the idea of having the main story being told by a narrator who then turns out to be unreliable. However, imagine if Suspects had waited an hour before bringing Verbal into the interrogation room and just featured Kujan and others talking about the case until he arrived. The intention in Identity is clearly to create some kind of suspense as to when the events in the motel are taking place, but instead it just creates confusion so by the time of the reveal, you just end up thinking 'what?'

And while it is well-acted, all of the actors are playing the sort of roles they could do in their sleep - John Cusack is a good guy with a troubled past, Rebecca DeMornay's a bitchy Hollywood actress on the slide, Alfred Molina's a kindly psychiatrist and Ray Liotta plays a really intense guy who turns out to be a psycho. Gosh, didn't see that coming. If you're going to put actors in roles the audience recognise them in from an infinite number of other movies with no surprises, it's hard for us to care. They all put in good jobs, though it sometimes seems that Cusack's just faxing in his performance, but none of them have anything special to work with.

It's not a horrendously bad movie, just a disappointing one. If you've really got nothing else to watch then it fills an hour and a half quite nicely, but prepare to feel disappointed afterwards.