a ludicrous thriller

Rating: 4/10 (26 April 2003)

Identity takes two or three of the most ludicrous plots you've never seen, twines them together in a ball of yarn, dips it all in a bucket of atmospheric goop and calls it a psychological thriller.
Well, it is, quite literally, a psychological thriller, though its version of psychology is so far removed from real human mental activity that it leaves the unfolding of the drama seeming mechanical, arbitrary and yet predictable (in other words: written).
The less said about the plot, the better, both in order to avoid inevitable spoilers, and because the story gets off to a contrived start, then meanders downhill into the realm of the silly. Generally speaking, though, this is a film that plants itself proudly at the head of the Too-Clever-by-Half crowd. Along with Memento, The Sixth Sense, and other assorted half-baked postmodern thrillers of the past 5 years, it makes the fatal error of thinking that the secret to a good thriller is to outsmart the audience. While it fails to accomplish even that lamentable goal (except in flashes where it works by confusion and obfuscation), it does, like those other films, demonstrate that the tactic does not a great movie make.

The film does manage to sustain a kind of jumpy nervousness that has to count as some kind of accomplishment compared to, say, the boredom that overtakes one midway through The Sixth Sense, but it is in its insistence on sustaining that feeling through every homogenously gloomy, rainsoaked scene of the film that the director reveals how little he understands the genre...how little modern Hollywood understands, in fact, the genre. Hitchcock demonstrated over 40 years ago that the magic ingredient to the great thriller was the seemingly banal patina of modern life from which the director would manage to extract one unexpected horror after another (whether Norman Bates' mother or the Birds of Bodega Bay). Identity lacks even a single scene that could be said to reside in that everyday world. Every scene is filmed like a climax, with dripping gutters, howling winds, distraught heroes, and the flinty scrapes of knives slipping in between ribs. It takes the insistent, homogenous aesthetic of a television commercial and plays it out for two hours. All that's missing is Catherine Zeta-Jones showing up with a working T-mobile cell phone at key moments in the plot and you'd have a heck of a marketing blitz. I'm not convinced, however, that this is why we go to the movies, when we go to the movies.