Watchable, but overall a disappointing waste of talent.

Rating: 5/10 (20 May 2003)

Ten or so people become stranded at a vacant hotel on a dark and very rainy night. Emotions are high since a woman has been hit by a car and is seriously injured. The roads are blocked off by flooding. No one can escape. What better time for a psycho killer to start picking them off one by one?
That's the basic plot of this TEN LITTLE INDIANS-style suspenser, with all of the expected plot twists and brief gory flashes of violence, and it actually begins surprisingly well. The production values/technical credits are top-notch and the cast is good. John Cusack as a chauffeur escorting obnoxious actress Rebecca De Mornay, Ray Liotta as a cop with insane killer Jake Busey in his custody, Amanda Peet as a reformed hooker with a stash of dough, Clea Duvall and William Lee Scott as a bickering young couple, John C. McGinely as the husband of the wounded woman and (especially) John Hawkes as the sleazy hotel manager round out the cast of suspects. Several interesting things happen along the way in this film before it completely derails in the final third.
Despite strong things working in its favor, IDENTITY has several dull stretches and the ending is very poor, a frustrating cop-out to those of us who have seen this same tired ending a million times before. Whatever psychological mishmash the filmmakers want to throw at us is irrelevant; the ending here is no different than the "it was all a dream" ploy used to bail out after the script becomes an overplotted mess there's no other way out of.