A Shameful Betrayal

Rating: 1/10 (12 March 2007)

I must go against the tide of opinion here. Those people rating this film highly have to be deranged. This film represents exactly the wrong way to write a movie and goes against everything I've ever read about screenplay structure and application. The filmmakers of "Identity" have broken a sacred bond with us, the audience. They have betrayed us.
*** SPOILERS!!! ***
One of the cardinal rules of (successful) screenplay writing is to make the audience care about the characters. In this, all the actors do a bang-up job. Some really good casting here and I can't fault any of the actors, who all deliver excellent performances (even Amanda Peet, appropriately screechy here) except maybe the guy playing Malcolm.
But, 3/4 of the way through the film, the rug is yanked out from under us, and the audience is stabbed in the back. Everything we have been watching is not real, not even within the fictional construct of the film's artificial universe. None of the characters exist, the hotel doesn't exist, nobody was really killed, even the rain is false. Nothing that happens has made any sense, or needed to make any sense, because we have been watching the mindscape of an unappealing psychotic serial killer, not real people that the director and actors have tricked us into caring about.
When we, as audience members, enter a film screening, we are making an informal agreement between ourselves and the filmmakers, that we will suspend our disbelief, and, in turn, the filmmakers are going to provide us characters we can empathize with (or hate, if they are the villains), and a responsibly constructed story line that follows certain storytelling conventions. Identity changes the rules in the middle of the game! It's like going to watch a football game, only to be told half way through, sorry, this wasn't really a football game, it was really a BALLET about a football game.
Yes, I know there were some clues as to what was really happening presented right at the outset. But the fact that everything we were watching at the hotel didn't really exist was certainly hidden from us for far too long, until the only option remaining was that the whole thing was a dream or hallucination of some kind.
This was not a clever puzzle, or an enchanting riddle for the audience to solve.
This was a cheat, flat out. Straight up.
And shame on you, Mr. Cooney, and Mr. Mangold, for cheating your audience. It's one thing to pull a magic trick on your audience through the subtle art of misdirection. It's another to con them out of the price of a movie ticket or DVD. The old Bait and Switch in action. There's a reason why magicians get paid highly to perform, but hucksters and con men are thrown in prison.
Honestly, I am shocked that so many people rated this film so highly. If you really did enjoy this film, try the grade-Z cheapie Monster-A-Go-Go from 1965 (it's available on DVD), and tell me how much you enjoyed the ending of that film, another "mindblowing twist" that clubs us over the head with the fact that we just wasted our time watching what is a non-movie.
If you people enjoy watching a movie that figuratively stabs you in the back, then I can't do anything to help you. But personally, I want my money back.