Two good films spliced together to make a bad one

Rating: 5/10 (23 January 2008)

The twist- a sudden, unexpected development- is a common plot device in the modern cinema, especially in thrillers. Unfortunately for scriptwriters, most of the classic twists have been so over-used that they no longer come as a surprise to the audience. It no longer seems original to reveal that, for example, the hero's girl or best friend is really in league with the villains, or that a police officer investigating a crime is in fact responsible for committing it, or that a character believed to be dead is still very much alive.
Of course, the fact that a particular twist is so hackneyed as to have become a cliché does not prevent film-makers from continuing to rely upon it- "Reindeer Games" and "Along Came a Spider" are two examples of modern thrillers likely to leave audiences with a "seen it all before" feeling. The challenge to the really inventive scriptwriter is now to come up with as novel or outlandish a twist as possible. "Identity" is a good example.
The setting of the film is an isolated Nevada motel. (Motels, in the cinema, have always seemed sinister places ever since Hitchcock's "Psycho", set in the neighbouring state of Arizona). A sudden and violent rainstorm brings together ten strangers; the motel manager, a spoilt, arrogant movie star and her chauffeur (who turns out to be an ex-policeman), another policeman and the convict he is escorting, a prostitute, and two married couples, one of them with a young son. The mother of this boy has been injured after being struck by the film star's limousine.
One by one the members of this group start to die violent deaths. One of them must be a killer; the question is "Which one?" The film seems to be a traditional thriller along the lines of Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None", challenging the audience to work out who is the murderer. We can, for example, rule out Caroline the film star (first to die), or the convict (too obvious), or his police escort. (His violent, aggressive personality also makes him a too-obvious suspect, and in any case "the policeman did it" was a plot line famously used by Christie in another of her murder mysteries).
Intercut with the scenes set in the motel, however, are scenes set in a courtroom. The judge, prosecution and defence lawyers and a psychiatrist are discussing the case of a convicted murderer named Malcolm Rivers, who has been condemned to death. The psychiatrist claims to have new evidence about Rivers' mental state which could save his life. Rivers, however, is not one of the group at the motel, and cannot possibly be responsible for the killings there.
Then comes the twist, which shows what the connection is between the two seemingly unconnected plot lines. It is revealed that none of the events at the motel have ever taken place. The characters gathered there do not exist outside Rivers' mind. He suffers from multiple personality disorder, and each of the characters at the motel represents one of his many separate personalities. The supposed "killings" represent a struggle between these personalities for dominance. His psychiatrist believes that at the end only one of his personalities will survive- the personality responsible for the real-life murders committed by Rivers.
This is certainly an original twist. The trouble is that as soon as the truth is revealed it renders everything that has gone before essentially meaningless. It becomes difficult for us to care about the people in the motel, or to concern ourselves about which one of them is killing the others, once we realise that they are no more than the fantasies of a madman's sick mind. This is a pity, because the motel part of the film is actually quite well done- highly atmospheric with some good acting contributions, especially from John Cusack as Edward the chauffeur and Ray Liotta as the policeman escorting the convict.
"Identity" contains within it two potentially good films, one a murder mystery, the other a courtroom drama about the battle to save a mentally ill killer from the death penalty on the grounds of insanity. Unfortunately, these two good films have been incongruously spliced together to produce a bad one. 5/10