REVIEW: Identity (2003)

I’ve been debating recently as to whether the ending of a film can literally be so bad as to ruin the entire experience. If the rest of the film up until the third act has been a relatively pleasant and investing experience, can the ending really take it all away that fast? In Super, for example, it did kind of ruin the movie, as the ending undermined what the rest of the film was trying to do. In other movies, like today’s subject, however…it’s less complicated than that. In movies like Identity, the ending ruins the movie simply because it makes the whole thing completely suck while at the same time making you wish they hadn’t tried so damn hard to make something intellectual! Argh! But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s watch this stinker.

Director: James Mangold
Starring: John Cusack, Amanda Peet
Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0309698/

The movie begins with a bunch of cops preparing for a late night hearing the last night before a convicted murderer is about to get executed, and apparently the defense found some new evidence conveniently right before he was supposed to croak. What timely events!

Then we cut to a seedy looking motel where a family that looks like they should be in that god-awful Cape Fear remake is driving around. They run over a spiked heel in the middle of the road – weird, right? The movie thinks so, too, so it takes the time to flash back to a hooker played by Amanda Peet playing bondage birthday cake games with an old fat man, like something out of a horrible caption contest picture. Seriously, just look at this:

Anyway, she packs her stuff and then remembers she has to get something while driving later, so even though she’s all alone on a deserted road, she can’t just pull over and stop to look for it, no; she has to try and do it WHILE DRIVING. So she loses a bunch of stuff from her suitcase, including the shoe that the family ran over. Was this flashback…at all necessary to explain why a shoe was in the middle of the road? Actually yes, yes it was. I was actually hoping they would show MORE of that flashback, like why Amanda Peet became a hooker to begin with! Or what she ate for lunch the previous day. Or the first time she saw Two Girls One Cup.

Anyway, then the mother who was in the car gets hit by another car driven by everyone’s favorite limo driver, John Cusack, who was in 2012 several years later where he also played a limo driver. Amanda Peet was also in 2012. I SMELL CONSPIRACY! Anyway Cusack wants to go help the woman he just ran over, but the bitchy actress he’s driving around says no, because…well, there is no reason. She’s just a callous and horrible person.

Cusack, being a decent person, helps them anyway and they all go into a motel run by this guy, who was in Winter’s Bone and…yeah, he was certainly in that…anyway, in this movie he's just really prejudiced against Amanda Peet's hooker character. This unnecessary and senseless bias makes up the core of his character.

"I'm the highest class of cheap seedy motel owners!" Seriously you dumbass, don't prostitutes come in there all the time? Look at the place you run! Must be hard to get what very little business you get if you're selective about your customers!

And yeah, Amanda Peet is back. She drives back by the place where she lost her stuff – hours later? Really? What was she doing that whole time? Did she just reach her destination and then think, “gee, I really liked that one shoe I lost! Better go get it!”? That…just seems strange to me. Anyway, she gets stuck, too, and picked up by the Cusack. They find this other couple driving around, Lou and Gina, who don’t have a cell phone for them to use. What? Don’t have a cell phone? In this day and age? Pfft…it’s like this was made in 2003 or something…

Meanwhile, since this movie had too much dignity before, Ray Liotta shows up as a cop transporting a murderer to add his own input to the movie. He’s a short-tempered gun-crazy lunatic of a cop, but he’s still better than his character from Hannibal.

"Allow me to prevent you from ever finding me likable at all...mmmm...sleaze..."

His convict is played by Jake Busey from Starship Troopers, rounding out the cast of B-level actors you know you've seen in other movies, but can't remember exactly which ones. Joyous.

Then we see that Cusack apparently has the magical main character powers that every hero in these movies has as he manages to stitch up that George guy’s wife who he hit with the car earlier – oh, did you not even remember that with all the other nonsense going on in this movie? My bad. Allow me to never correct this convoluted insanity. But I digress – you know how in all of these poorly written films, the protagonist is a guy with a shit job who can somehow, almost magically, do unexpected things like fix wounds and take charge in tense situations? Cusack is like the poster child for that in this movie.

John Cusack is God! He can do ANYTHING!

Meanwhile in the courthouse, people shout because apparently that’s what this movie thinks is dramatic. Don’t have any actual depth? Try HAVING ALL YOUR CHARACTERS SHOUT ALL THE TIME AND LOOK SERIOUS. Screenwriting 101!

So before you start to think this whole thing is the set-up for a horrible Nancy Drew book, things get hairy as the actress Cusack was driving around is found murdered in the washing machine, because I guess she wasn’t clean enough! This of course sends everyone into a panic, especially when they find out that the convict Ray Liotta was transporting has escaped. This causes Lou and Gina to go have a sporadic fight for no apparent reason. Apparently, Gina lied about being pregnant to get Lou to marry her because her best friend told her that she saw him talking to some girl at a bar and…oh, do you care? Just put it on Jerry Springer. The whole thing ends with Lou gutted in the corner:

Well that's a LITTLE bloodier than most couple fights get...

Then they find out that Liotta's convict, who has been tied up to prevent him from doing anything crazy, has been murdered - SO WHO WAS THE KILLER? They get their answer when they find out that Larry has a dead body in his freezer. He tries to drive away but actually just hits and smashes George against a wall like a cartoon character turned to a pancake, killing him instantly. So they tie him up and he tells them the story of how he was broke and strapped for cash and came across the motel and found the owner dead, so he just started acting like he was the motel owner.

Then all the dead bodies start disappearing without a trace, like they were cleaned up by Samuel L. Jackson in Cleaner!

Except that was actually pretty good.

Then it's wacky fun escaping time as that Gina chick and the little kid, Timmy, try to drive away, but unfortunately the car has other plans for them, as it's tired of being in this movie and wants a quick out:

Then things get even WACKIER as everyone realizes they all have the same birthday and that their names are all named after states, like Ed Dakota, Larry Washington and so on, so forth. What relevance does this have to anything? Well, just wait a few minutes - you're about to be horribly disappointed.

And then time just unravels as John Cusack wakes up and gets told by Shakespearean actor Alfred Molina – yes, they got a guy who was in The Tempest to be in this garbage – that he (Cusack) is actually just one of this serial killer’s split personalities, of which there are 10 in total (i.e. all the main characters in the film), and one of them has been “killing” the other personalities inside his mind at the motel for the entire movie up until now.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet THE ONLY REAL CHARACTER IN THE MOVIE!

So yes. This movie just basically did a ‘none of it really happened’ trick on us. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I’m not even going to be able to review the rest of this in a linear fashion – it’s bullet point time!

+ First off, I must repeat – ARE YOU KIDDING ME? This is the worst ending twist I’ve maybe ever seen! How do you even DO something like this…you have a relatively good story going on and then you just completely BOTCH it with one of the outright stupidest ending twists ever! Couldn’t these idiots have just stuck to the motel story? That actually wasn’t bad! Sure, it was hammy, ridiculous and over the top, but it was at least an interesting story! The characters had some depth and they were getting kind of interesting. Why would I even WANT to watch a movie about some fat POS in a chair about to be electrocuted with multiple personalities? The movie has clearly picked the wrong plot to come out on the forefront.

+ So what, all of these characters are inside his mind, right? So Amanda Peet, John Cusack, Ray Liotta and that Winter’s Bone guy all live in the head of an overweight version of the Pillsbury Dough Boy? Somehow I don’t think that’s going to hold up. And since this guy was actually ‘acting out’ the whole movie in his head all along, just picture him doing that scene with the prostitute and the guy handcuffed to the bed with the birthday cake on his chest. Isn’t that a pretty picture?

Eugh.

+ Third, the premise behind this is that the multiple personalities this guy has are the characters we’ve been watching this whole time, and they are killing each other off in a mental “battle” for a dominant personality to emerge. This could possibly be interesting if it were handled in a better way (more on that in the next bullet point), like in some kind of really artsy film, but for what is supposed to be a grounded, semi-realistic psychological thriller? It’s beyond bad. The whole premise is that the defense lawyer for the guy is trying to get the court to overturn his execution by proving that the “killer” personality is gone. How are they supposed to prove that? Are they just going to point at him and say “Look, he’s cured now”?

There is NO WAY this would ever fly in any actual US courtroom. He would be sent to the killing chair the second that idiotic psychologist brought up the concept that his multiple personalities were literally killing each other off in his mind like a bad Friday the 13th sequel. I mean really, you might as well just use the South Park Imaginationland argument and argue that leprechauns are real even though they’re imaginary – in fact that argument was much better handled than the one THIS crockpot of a lawyer is suggesting!

+ And FOURTH and finally, this story is handled in a crapsack, hamfisted, clumsy-ass way! There’s no subtlety to this! Oh, it’s raining all the time because his mind is in chaos! Oh, the characters all have the same birthday because it’s really HIS birthday! SUCH SUBTLE CLUES! Why don’t you just slap a B-roll on the bottom of the screen explaining how we’re supposed to be SO AMAZED at this movie’s intellect the entire runtime? You might as well.

To sum it up, this plot twist is total, complete and utter ass!

Phew. So let’s wrap it up – Liotta is revealed to be an escaped prisoner who just disguised himself as a cop. He kills off Larry and eventually shoots John Cusack, too, who is a saint for actually giving a crap about his performance in this thing – seriously, acting like he cared about any of this must have been an exercise in sheer mastery of will – and then Amanda Peet kills him, too, escaping to an orange grove in Florida, a plot point which was explained somewhere while you were marveling over how stupid the end plot twist was.

Then we flash back to the real world again where the courts, probably because they were just tired of being in this piece of shit movie, have decided that the killer’s execution will be stayed, since they apparently DID believe that Liotta was the “killer personality” and that now that the Ray Liotta portion of his brain has been removed, he is no longer a danger to anyone. But since Ray Liotta has no brain, what does this really mean? Is it a statement on how little our minds actually see that’s true? Or is it saying that you should have spent your money on a different movie? I’m going with the second one.

Really, the only thing that could possibly make this movie any worse is if the little kid, who disappeared earlier, turned out to be the killer all alo---

Don't f*ck with little kids!

AW, GODDAMN, YOU JUST HAD TO DO IT, DIDN’T YOU?! You morons! Were you just trying for the worst possible ass-fest of twists you could think of? The Sixth Sense and Signs were still pretty recent; were you just trying to outdo those for worst ending twists ever put on screen? It’s made more insulting when they actually put in horrible over the top flashbacks from the kid’s point of view that explain how he killed everyone, like we couldn’t “get” it otherwise. Ugh! I don’t even care. This review is over. I don’t even have to explain why this one sucks, do I? Just don’t watch it. You’ll have a better day.

Images copyright of their original owners.

REVIEW: The Others (2001)

There are SPOILERS in this review!

Horror movies are hard to do right; I will admit this as freely as anyone, and I am a huge fan of the genre. What it comes down to is that horror is a genre that works on a very different level than most other genres, and emphasizes very different aspects of filmmaking – like how you can make an effective horror movie with barely any money. Horror doesn’t need money; it needs atmosphere, creativity and heart to do right! But sometimes there does come along a rare big budget Hollywood horror movie that simply smokes everything out there…such is the case with The Others, which is a veritable masterwork of horror craft and style.

Director: Alejandro Amenábar

Starring: Nicole Kidman, Finnuola Finnegan, Alakina Mann, James Bentley

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0230600/

This movie is just awesome. It’s completely accessible and friendly to viewers of more mainstream films, and yet it doesn’t pull any punches and is always elegant, well-written and classy. That’s not to say that the scares aren’t there – they are. The scares are perhaps some of the best I have seen in any post-2000 horror film, as The Others uses a very subtle, understated style that leaves most of the horror to your imagination. And the subtle build of tension eventually leads to a much better payoff when the big, supernatural scares start rolling toward the end.

It’s kind of like Hemingway’s iceberg theory – you only see the tip of the iceberg, where the rest is hidden below the surface. One scene very early on that floored me is when the two kids, Anne and Nicholas (Alakina Mann and James Bentley), are sleeping in their room, and he hears her talking to a “ghost,” who talks back in a different voice, but you don’t really see anything but the back of her head from his perspective. So is she talking to a ghost, or is she really just doing voices, like he initially thinks? And when the “ghost” touches him…? That is brilliant, brilliant scare tactics right there, and it was at about that point that I realized I was dealing with something more than a garden variety horror film. The build-up to the movie, full of scenes where Nicole Kidman’s character hears things going bump in her big, spacious house, is rife with these kinds of techniques, these manipulations of the viewer, and it really shows a great mind at work here with the directing. Director Alejandro Amenábar hasn’t directed many other films, which is a shame.

Nicole Kidman in The Others, traversing amidst her dark abode...

The characters are all really good, too, even when you think they’re going to be really stock clichés. Nicole Kidman is Grace, a domineering but caring mother of two children who are photosensitive, and can’t be exposed to the sun for too long. They live in a big old country mansion in the 40s after World War II, and the story begins just as they hire Bertha Mills (Fionnula Finnegan) and her traveling companions as help around the house.

Kidman really does a great job at capturing Grace’s tight, strict demeanor and devotion to the Lord, which pretty much frame her entire character. She is quite vividly colored and I actually found myself totally drawn into the performance, believing every inch of it. The kids, same thing, they are excellent. Bertha Mills is one of the better characters, and Fionnula Finnegan really makes you question her motives at every turn – you know there’s something up with her, but what is it? Or are you just being paranoid? Her companions are a young mute girl and an elderly man, neither of whom have many lines, but both end up as sufficiently creepy and suspicious anyway.

Having the kids be photosensitive is an interesting twist and really made for some cool, inventive visual touchstones – like how Grace has to close all the windows and doors to make sure the sun doesn’t creep in accidentally. One scene in the beginning shows this quite well – after telling Anne to leave the room to study by herself, Grace has to first tell Bertha to close the windows in the adjoining room to keep her daughter safe. This plot point wasn’t entirely necessary to move the story forward, but the fact that it is there adds another layer of complexity and weight to the plot, upping the ante on the danger present in a very peculiar and unique way. The fog constantly surrounding the house is great, too, always looking ominous and ghostly, setting the stage with a real atmosphere.

The film closes with two plot twists, one right after the other. First we find out that Bertha and her companions have been dead the whole time, accompanied by some beautiful, haunting shots of the country house at night in the fog. The shot of the three of them walking slowly toward the kids is bone-chilling.

Haunting!

The final twist is perhaps not completely unexpected, but it is pulled off with gusto and drama – that the entire family, Grace and the kids and all, have been dead since the beginning of the film. Shock and awe! In reality, the ‘ghosts’ they’ve been hearing the whole time have been living people trying to move into the house. It is a rather humorous and witty take on the genre, as everything the main characters have been doing throughout the film would have been the ‘ghostly’ activity inflicted upon the characters in any other movie. Those curtains opening randomly? The rustling and bumping in the night? Quite eerie to think about, really…and quite a great deconstruction of the ghost story. The Sixth Sense has nothing on this.

Really this is a movie about death and our perceptions of our own lives. Nobody can really talk about ghosts with any kind of certainty, but The Others does a fine job of commenting on the ways we view ourselves and how little it sometimes means when the outside world sees us so much differently. The realization of death is bitter and painful, but inevitable too. There’s something to be said for Grace’s final speech, which amounts to her own character weaknesses and strengths all at once – very good writing. She has to face the reality that God did not give her a second chance to be a good mother, and that she’s been lingering on Earth as a ghost, and really, what does it all mean?

It is not a happy tale, and the implications are all quite macabre as to what actually transpired, as opposed to the movie’s unreliable narration, but the film is powerful and haunting all the same. I also like that it’s so accessible and cleaned up. Rather than coming off as cheap and phoned in just to make a quick buck, it feels like time and effort went into making it – a calculated, precise work that shows its effort off like a badge. This is a very mainstream take on the horror genre, and for once it actually works like a gem, as The Others is just magnificent. Scary, artful, meaningful and gripping, this is a bonafide classic of the genre.

Pictures copyright of their respective owners.

REVIEW: The Sixth Sense (1999)

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Starring: STUTTERING STANLEY!

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167404/

“STUTTERING STANLEY! STUTTERING STANLEY!”

-Cole

What can you say about M. Night Shyamalan? Well, lots of derogatory things. But what about the movies he made that were actually not all out terrible as opposed to just…hollow, and without much feeling that isn’t sappy melodrama? That’s right. This is The Sixth Sense.

The film starts out with Bruce Willis and his wife celebrating an award the mayor gave him for being a great psychologist. They go upstairs to have hot steaming sex and decidedly do NOT notice the crazy man in his underwear standing in their bathroom waiting for them. That’s a real buzzkill on the sexual tension, guy. Don’t you have any tact? Next time wait till AFTER they’re done ravaging each other to go nuts. It’s just proper manners and all.

So yeah, this is apparently one of Willis’ old patients who feels like Willis didn’t help him at all and maybe even made his problems worse. He says everyone calls him a freak. He pulls out a gun from God knows where – he’s only wearing his underwear, remember; so I don’t know if I want to think about where it was before…and then he shoots Willis straight in the chest, not even giving him one chance to say anything. He then shoots himself as the camera fades to black…to “the next fall.”

We then see Willis sitting outside this house on a breezy autumn day right out of any given commercial. Haley Joel Osment comes out and runs down the street, with Willis in hot pursuit. He goes into a church to play with his toys, because that’s where you always went to play when you were a kid, right? I remember I used the holy water to make a flood on my GI Joes. And in the confessionals we played hide and seek. Oh the fun times I had.

"Don't you mess with the action figures. My Macaulay Culkin-esque demeanor does NOT approve!"

So yeah, this is Cole, one of Willis’ new patients apparently, who likes to follow him wherever he goes and try to get him to talk about his feelings. They have some conversations and Willis even comes back again the next day at Cole’s house, where Cole just doesn’t want to talk. Willis tells Cole that if he can guess what Cole is thinking, then Cole has to take steps forward until he’s sitting in the chair opposite Willis. Of course, Cole goes along with it, even though everything Willis asks seems to be pretty specific. I think in reality this question-and-answer exchange might go a little bit differently:

BRUCE WILLIS: You’re thinking that your mom abandoned you after your father left.

COLE: What are you talking about, wacko? I just got home from school and I want some Cheez-Its. *steps back*

Oh, and the kid also has a watch, which apparently his father gave him before he left. Hmmm…

Well, I guess we know what really happened to it. I’m glad that problem’s solved.

So after that, Cole goes to school again the next day, where his teacher asks the class what the history of the school is. Cole says people got hanged there, and the teacher says that it isn’t true. Cole thinks the teacher is looking at him funny and calls him out on it. Cole starts screaming violently at the guy, shouting “STUTTERING STANLEY, STUTTERING STANLEY!” over and over again. Yeah, apparently that’s what all the kids used to call the teacher when he was a kid. How Cole knows this isn’t yet explained, but it is really funny and probably the only part of this movie that really got a reaction out of me. I mean, it’s just so over the top goofy sounding. He just cups his ears and starts fucking screaming at the poor guy. On top of that, wouldn’t it suck to coincidentally have a name that starts with the same letter that your disability does? That’s just asking for it.

After Stuttering Stanley calls him a freak (is there no other insult in this world but ‘freak’?), Cole is sitting alone waiting for his mom when Bruce Willis comes in again. They have another conversation about Cole’s insecurity and I just have to wonder, how many times are they going to do this? It’s like the movie has such a short attention span that it thinks we wouldn’t get the point if they didn’t CRAM IT IN every five minutes that Willis is trying to help Cole out. We get it. You can do something else now. Oh, so Willis shows Cole a magic trick with a quarter? Big whoop.

So Cole gets invited to this other kid’s birthday party who he apparently doesn’t like. He shows the same trick with the quarter to some other kid, who promptly tells him it’s stupid. Cole is so frustrated at this that he leaves and goes upstairs, where a ghost is rattling around inside a cupboard. These two bullies happen to see him from downstairs, and follow him up there. Because all little kids aside from the main character are little douchenozzles with no human qualities, they lock him inside the cupboard as he screams for his life. Isn’t that just precious? Speaks volumes for the rights and protection of little children everywhere! His mom gets him out but by then he’s already fainted and has to be taken to the hospital.

Now, brace yourselves, audience. You’re about to witness one of the GREATEST…no, no, that won’t work…one of the MOST MEMORABLE…no, no, that isn’t it either…oh, I got it. YOU’RE ABOUT TO WITNESS ONE OF THE MOST OVER-USED POP CULTURE PHRASES OF THE 90S! As Willis comes into the hospital room – does he have any life besides tending to this kid? I mean, I’m glad to see a doctor taking a personal interest in his patients but GEEZ – Cole is lying there and says he’ll finally tell Willis his secret. He says “I see dead people.”

Well so do they, and look how they turned out!

Yup. That’s the big reveal. No big secret behind it, no explanation, no nothing. Just “I see dead people.” And we’re supposed to ACCEPT that, movie? We’re supposed to buy this obvious cop out of cheap writing? You expect me to just lie down and TAKE this?

…well, yeah. Yeah. That is what I’m going to do.

So apparently Cole sees ghosts everywhere and they try to talk to him. He’s afraid of them, so Willis tells him – apparently not questioning this at all or thinking about the repercussions of telling him to keep indulging in his could-be-insane-fantasies – to try and actually help the ghosts next time. The movie, ignoring the fact that this could be a potentially awesome plot for an entire other film, mostly shoves this into the last third of its running time. We see several ghosts roaming his house, including one kid that was shot in the head by his own father and a sick, diseased looking mom that slit her wrists trying to escape her abusive husband. So yeah. Those would make for interesting plotlines, right? These will really give the film the extra edge it needs to forever etch itself inside the viewer’s mind, right?

Too much oatmeal...

No, instead they go ONLY with the little girl whose mother poisoned her until she died, which I have to say is a much less interesting plot. What kind of fucked up parent would do that? Why? Well, I looked on the Wikipedia page for this movie and it claimed that this is actually a form of child abuse called Munchausen syndrome by proxy. How did Shyamalan know enough about this disease to include it in his movie? My guess is he spent a day looking through medical textbooks for some obscure disease that nobody in the mainstream would know about. But at least somebody’s being creative…not like you’d see that from him again in the future too much.

Then in the car later he tells his mom that he can see ghosts, citing that his grandmother comes to visit him all the time from beyond the grave and tells him that she’s proud of his mother every day. This provokes an extremely sappy and overdone scene that mostly makes me roll my eyes and tap my feet on the floor waiting for it to end.

Meanwhile, while that’s going on we get Willis’ side of the story. Apparently his wife doesn’t like the person he’s become after he got shot in the beginning of the film. Gee. I wonder why that is? It couldn’t possibly be because he’s been spending every waking moment with a little kid who claims to see ghosts, could it? Maybe she wouldn’t cheat on you if you actually gave her the time of day! Maybe if you…oh, wait, I’m sorry, we have a big stupid plot twist interrupting: HE’S BEEN DEAD THE WHOLE TIME AND HAS NOT BEEN ABLE TO ACCEPT IT! Through a montage of scenes we already saw in the movie, Shyamalan guides us safely through this whole thing without any confusion at all. Because, as the viewers, we are far too stupid to figure it out for ourselves. Aw. How nice of him.

So yeah, The Sixth Sense; it’s pretty much lame and yet everyone loves it for some reason. Admittedly, this is a lot better than most of the bullshit I review on this blog. It’s decently acted, the story is told OK and the recurring themes and elements are well done for a pop film intended for wide audiences. It might not be the most intelligent or the most emotional film out there, and it doesn't delve as much into Cole's psyche and problems as I would have liked, but I can at least kind of see why people like it so much. Even if I think it’s pretty boring and silly. But enough of that shit. It’s time to review the Cube movies.

AHHHHHHHH!