Identity Theft, or,

A Review of Identity

by June Pulliam

Identity.  Dir. James Mangold.  2003.

Identity is one of those movies that promises a great deal and delivers very little. Alas, the makers of a great many mainstream American films mistake weirdness, plot twists and film noir effects for a truly original and intelligent plot. This, sadly, is the case with Identity. Before I begin this review, let me warn you, gentle reader, that I'll be giving away the ending, although many people have told me they guessed it very soon into the film. However, if you are one of those people whose enjoyment of a film will be spoiled by this information, read no further. You cant say you weren't warned.

The plot is basically this: one rainy night, a series of events brings ten strangers to a remote lodging reminiscent of the Bates Motel. While these individuals are all checking in, in another part of the state, attorneys for a mentally ill man on death row make a last minute plea to save their client. The condemned is pumped full of mind altering drugs and brought to face a panel of judges, while his legal counsel introduces evidence not available to them at the trial. This new evidence will prove that their client suffers from multiple personality disorder, and is therefore not guilty by reason of insanity.

Meanwhile, back at the hotel, the inclement weather has also forced a police officer transporting a dangerous criminal to seek shelter. All roads leading out of the valley are flooded, the phone lines are down, and no one has a functioning cell phone, so the ten are trapped. Soon the prisoner escapes, and the motel's occupants are gruesomely killed one by one. Even stranger, a numbered hotel key is found near each body in reverse order. Thus the first victim is found with the key to room #10, the second with the key to room #9, and so forth.

At first, everyone suspects that the escaped prisoner is the killer, but this theory is discredited early on when-- he's recaptured and ends up being victim number eight. The hotel manager is the next suspect, as the prisoner was killed with his baseball bat, and it's later discovered that the manager has been hiding the body of someone else in his freezer for the past month. But the hotel manager's guilt is also quickly disproved.

The strangers at the hotel are all well-known stereotypes: the inept police officer, the crazed killer with no rational for his love of mayhem, the whore with the heart of gold, the selfish actress, the ex cop who lost his "faith" in his profession after he failed to save a suicide, the sleazy hotel manager. When five people are left alive, they discover that all ten share the same birth date and are named after cities. Then the film takes us back to the criminal on death row.

At this point in the film, I had a moment of forgiveness for the writer's seemingly lazy use of these stereotypes when it is revealed that they weren't actually people at all, but the voices in the head of the condemned, the very personalities who populated the twisted landscape of his consciousness. These facets of the condemned's personality had all been brought to this hotel in the first place as a result of the most recent psychotherapy he'd been given, aimed at integrating or killing off these people, especially the part of him that violently murdered six people in the real world.

And here my indulgence of the writer came to an abrupt end as he demonstrated that we had never really left the land of Hollywood and its puerile idea of a twist at the end.

The judges see that the condemned is truly insane, and also believe that his ten personalities have been successfully integrated into the very wounded self. Thus they halt the execution, commuting the prisoner's sentence to life in a mental institution. Flash ahead to the prisoner being transported to his new home, when he kills his psychiatrist and presumably escapes. Did this really happen, or is it yet another of the killer's demented fantasies? Who cares. Stevie Wonder AND Ray Charles could have seen THIS coming.

Throughout the entire film, the words derivative and leftovers kept popping into my mind as a sort of subtitles that would have been appropriate to periodically roll at the bottom of the screen. Over and over again, homage is paid to Hitchcock's Psycho. The sleazy hotel clerk resembles Norman Bates. The bratty actress is killed beneath the shelter of a shower curtain, pulled down from her bathroom to drape over her head for protection from the rain as she desperately tries to get a cell phone signal outside. Another of the characters escapes being killed while in the bathroom (in horror films, no bathroom is safe since Psycho). At one point, she opens the door to check if the coast is clear, only to see the killer's chef knife-wielding shadow on the wall. Identity is also derivative of all of other thrillers with clever twists, such as Seven and Memento. Even the highly stylized shots used by the director of photography are derivative of every other film that used them.

I have no problem with films demonstrating an understanding of their particular genre by incorporating elements of previous film. Sometimes these incorporations can be extremely amusing. The Stepfather incorporates two elements from Psycho and The Birds when the heroine is trapped in the bathroom by her homicidal stepfather. The safety and privacy of the bathroom is violated when the heroine innocently showers, unaware that her mother's husband is on a killing spree down stairs, or that the viewer too is violating her privacy by peeping her adolescent nudity. Later, as she tries to escape this room, The Birds is invoked when her cries for help disturb a utility line laden with at least a hundred black birds. Rob Zombie's recent House of 1000 Corpses is set in the 1970s, and is nothing but a clever and literate sampling of the horror films of that era.

Alas, Identity isn't so much paying a loving tribute to earlier traditions as it is plagiarizing them. Viewers who aren't terribly culturally literate regarding thrillers might find Identity a witty and original edition to the genre that gives a unique perspective on the mind of someone with multiple personality disorder (although I should probably interject here that most people with MPD aren't homicidal maniacs). Others might even enjoy the way the film looks, even if it is derivative of other, better films. Identity provided me with a reasonably enjoyable way to pass an afternoon that might otherwise be spent mowing the lawn and washing cars.

However, it wasn't memorable for one simple reason: It has no identity of its own.

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