Identity
24 April 2003
Thursday, 11:06 AM
If you read Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None: Hollywood fed it through the Shyamalan and Craven machines and changed its name to Identity. Wait, that could be read as a compliment. Try this instead: If you saw Adaptation: Donald Kaufman’s script for The Three has been made into a movie. They changed the name to Identity. James Mangold directed it. Thank goodness for free sneak previews. I was thinking about paying to see this one.
And you know, I was into it for a little while. There are more than a few nods to Hitchcock, and John Cusack is so unfailingly charismatic that you really think for a minute that this might turn out okay. But it soon becomes all too clear that Identity’s tangled mess of red herrings can’t possibly be resolved in any plausible fashion. And it is not. Instead, they tack on a montage of nonsensical twists, cut it, print it, and hand it off to an editor fresh out of music video school. Trés chic.
Filed under: Film
