Not Your Typical Slasher

Rating: 8/10 (29 April 2003)

As I turned the key in my car's ignition, the familiar bass of Queen came tumbling out of my speakers. `Are you ready, Are you ready for this/Are you hanging on the edge of your seat?' How is that for coincidence, I mean, what better song to be playing after watching a bloody flick like `Identity'?
On a rainy night in a place in Nevada that could be quite well described as the Middle of Nowhere, ten perfect strangers all end up in a desert motel. There is the pleasant York family with the father (John McGinley) and son Timothy (Bret Loehr) trying to hold together after a messy accident puts the mother (Leila Kenzle) on death's door. The cause of the accident also shows up at the motel in the form of a pampered actress (Rebecca De Mornay) and her faithful chauffer Ed (John Cusack) being the ones who actually hit Mrs. York.
Then there is the prostitute, Paris (Amanda Peet), who, for some odd reason is detested by the creepy hotel clerk, Larry (John Hawkes). The next set of people is made up of the newlyweds (Clea DuVall and William Lee Scott). The final set of people is the cop (Ray Liotta) with his prisoner escortee (Jake Busey), which makes for a nice combination on a stormy night. Oh, and I must add that in a seemingly unrelated tangent, there is a hearing going on in some California town to decide on a soon-to-be-executed prisoner's aptness to be killed.
As one may expect, people start dying, often in gruesome fashions, which leads in to this nifty bit from the song of the column--`Another one bites the dust/ Another one bites the dust.' Then comes a twist that may or may not blow your mind, but I'll leave that little bit of the mind-twist for y'all to figure out.
This is one creepy film. I don't do horror/suspense well, so I really have nothing to base this off of, but it had me hooked. The first two acts play out nearly perfectly, with the suspense building and building as another character bites the dust. To this, I credit director James Mangold for keeping it moving and also keeping the audience guessing as to which member is the killer.
The third act of the film, though, threw me for a loop. In some ways, it is a very good twist, but in others, the entire pacing of the movie is interrupted and throws the audience off of its guard for a moment or two, which is not exactly a good thing to do.
A couple of stand-out performances-John Cusack is excellent as the closest thing to a `hero' the film provides as he basically walks the audience through the clues. I also give kudos to John Hawkes for his motel clerk who offers the precise amount of patheticness and menace to be intriguing. One other good job goes to Amanda Peet who is solidly spectacular as a flawed semi-heroine.
But as with most large casts, there are a couple performances that left a bit to be desired-for one, Leila Kenzle (this is not that big of a spoiler, so don't protest!) as her character is supposedly lying dead, well, when a dead person is noticeably breathing, that is not that good of a thing. I also did not particularly care for Jake Busey's convict-character because what we did see was just not really enough and a bit more could have been done with him.
`And another one gone, and another one gone/ Another one bites the dust/ Hey, I'm gonna get you too/ Another one bites the dust.' As this review bites the dust, I can conclude that the tension in `Identity' never really bit the dust, as proof, my heart rate was up over normal by nearly 40 BPM right after the film ended, which speaks to the tenseness. I think that `Identity', especially when coupled with an amazing coincidence, is deserving of an 8 out of 10.