If this were a book it would be psychobabble

Rating: 4/10 (18 January 2004)

This is really a mess. One wonders how such movies get made. James Mangold, who was off to such fine start in his directorial career with the critically acclaimed Heavy (1995) and the superior psychodrama Girl, Interrupted (1999), and even the slightly offbeat but intriguing Cop Land (1997), really loses it here with this bizarro attempt at something like Psycho and David and Lisa meet Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians."
The premise is ridiculous and the resolution just plain silly. Without revealing anything (the denouement of the obtuse plot being perhaps the only thing that might keep the thumb of most intelligent viewers over the age of, say, fourteen, off the stop button) let me say that when it's over you just might feel cheated.
John Cusack stars as an ex-cop, now a chauffeur, who can suture wounds. The scene is the Nevada/California desert during a savage downpour that traps ten (+1) people at an isolated motel where bloody mayhem of the most inexplicable sort ensues as one by one the guests turn up dead. The action consists of wet people screaming and staring with horror at such sights as a dead man with a baseball bat shoved three-quarters of the way down his throat, etc. They insult each other a lot. Prostitutes don't like cops; little guys who never got any, hate prostitutes, and the little boy doesn't really love his mommy, etc. As the coincidences pile up (as the motel proprietor remarked, with the odds against being "trillions to one") we begin to realize that either something supernatural is going on or... You guessed it. It's all a....
But I can't say. We do get a hint of how everything will turn out when Mangold flash-forwards to a group of shrinks and other interested parties who are holding a kind of seance around what seems to be John Cusack's character.
Anyway, even the acting is not that good with the usually very fine Cusack seemingly infected by the deficiencies of the other players, or the stupidities of the script, or the impatient-to-get-it-over-with direction by Mangold. (I don't think the actors wanted too many takes in all that water, and it shows.) At any rate if you want to see a little kid and some mediocre actors overact or a lot of people deadpan the horror their eyes spy while barking at each other or you just like seeing Hollywood players have to make a living while wet, go for it. Otherwise, hit the off button and watch reruns of "That 70's Show."
(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!)