Another journey to a serial killer's mind... A mindless popcorn flick

Rating: 5/10 (24 January 2009)

Each Friday night of my teenagehood years passed with watching Horror classics. When the mysterious killer reveals out to be a child of my age or even younger, that had always gotten me into an excitement. Watching "Nightmare on Elm Street" was a proof of mine, saying "-Look, I'm totally grown up, now. I don't afraid of Freddy any more. Huh huh!" , to mum.
Time's changed. Horror genre is strengthened by mindless mysteries and sentimentalism. This new type of horror can't make viewers laugh or have fun any more. If not getting any fun from a horror, why watching it? The plot is solely good for mystery; yet the director chose to make a horror/teen slasher, which happened to be a fallacious deduction. Directing and editing is totally awful. "Identity" is talented director James Mangold's worst movie. From 1995 to 2005, his first decade of industrial movie making experience had caught everybody's attention. The present time is 2009. His latest works "Walk The Line" and "3:10 to Yuma" scored success both on box-office and on film critics. I wish we won't see any disappointment from him any more.
Reminiscent of Agatha Christie's "And There Were None"(1945), Hitchcock's Psycho and Kubrick's idea of mystery at Indian cemetery; there is no such thing as an original idea. The opening scene sparks off a traffic accident profits from each character's view of the accident. No one was guilty. Followed by coincidences 8 adult, 1 child and the runner of the motel got stuck in a deluge. The story telling was as good as 2004's best motion picture winner "Crash". Differently, they never tried to break free from their situation. Instead, they make each other fall into a calamity. After two more coincidences, we learned as a third coincidence that everyone shares the same birthday. 10 people, all of them, have born on the 10th of May. Then Amanda Peet tried to save the situation: "This place used to be an Indian cemetery".
Even before the first half of the movie, it happened to become a comedy by a chain of disasters and coincidences. Thanks to Alan Silvestri, who has composed a good music score. Watching for the reason to learn what's going to happen at the end, has been the key factor that made viewers think this is better than an average movie. Quite frankly, it is not. Film editing is dreadful.
1 out of 10 for editing. 8 out of 10 for acting. When you come to the end, you'll realize that it's not the movie you're watching any more. It's so easy that when a director puts all the different puzzles and mysteries altogether mixing them with some sentimentalism, and when at the end his leading actor says:
"Sorry, I am a paranoiac. I was only dreaming. Nothing really happened. Everything was just a dream."