Great start..... poor ending.....

Rating: 6/10 (10 May 2005)

Where do I start with this one ???
Cast : John Cusack, Ray Liotta, Amanda Peet - small parts by John McGinley, Jake Busey, Rebecca De Mornay. I like Cusack and Liotta - and Peet is very easy on the eye if nothing else. So far so good.
Director : James Mangold - did CopLand which I also liked.
Film : Through a series of accidents, bad luck, bad weather - 10 people end up in a Motel stranded. All strangers. Then they start to die. Great premise, nicely staged scenes at the motel where the viewer is left wondering who the hell is killing these guys. There are a few cliché characters but overall, the thing works for me. I enjoyed the paranoia in the rain-swept building as people begin to get bumped off one by one. There are also a few "clues" scattered in the early scenes which make you crease your eyebrows a little in a "what the hell does that mean" manner. Then it transpires that the apparent strangers are in fact linked- they all have the same birthday and all their last names represent a state in America - Maine/Rhodes/Dakota etc. By this stage I am about 70 minutes into the film and I too am intrigued as to how they will finish this - hoping they won't cop out and throw in a flimsy finish.
I was disappointed.
Suddenly, we flash to John Cusack in a chair in a room full of lawyers / doctors etc. and alternating between his own body and another fat guy's body by some quick camera cuts. What ??? We did see an earlier scene with this guy - who is trying to get off an electric chair sentence by some clever doctor talk - but the way it was presented was that this guy somehow killed all the people in the motel. At least that's how I picked it up. But in actuality - and this is a cop out if ever I saw one - John Cusack, the fat psycho and all the other people in the Motel are actually all figments of the fat guy's imagination, all different identities but only one of the identities is the real killer. So by getting them all together through the doc's talking - and getting them to kill each other off, he hopes to kill the killer's identity thus leaving the fat guy a harmless gimp. POOR !! POOR !! POOR !!
The film went from being a thinking man's movie - to a downright cheap, second-rate cash-in on the psychos fare !!!!
Great promise but it degraded to a shallow jump-out...