Review – Identity

Do writing teachers no longer do the lesson about not writing shaggy dog stories? If not, they seriously need to consider restarting the practice. This movie starts out as a Hitchcock/Serling style thriller about a group of 11 people trapped together by unlikely circumstances in a motel in the middle of nowhere. One by one they’re murdered a la the explicitly-referenced Agatha Christie novel not to mention dozens of other closed-environment murder thrillers (though the gore here is somewhat more graphic than in most of the older productions that take this same path). As the cast thins, the remaining characters discover that they’ve got an unnatural number of trivial things in common. And then … well, then comes the plot twist that made me almost entirely lose interest in the whole show. I guess it was original enough, but it made the drama a little less than compelling. The acting was fine, production values were solid, and even the dialogue wasn’t the end of the world. The movie was just undone by its own plot. See if desperate