OK, I just saw Identity, and feel utterly and deeply let down by the ending. 95% of the movie was smart, engaging, and above all HONEST. Misleading, but without cheating.
[spoiler]The stupid last twist was so LAME-A$$ I mean, WTF? To spend most of a movie setting up the Motel scenario, with such a great payoff, and then to obliterate its interior logic by having TIMMY be the psycho? I fail to understand how an eight, nine-year-old kid, tops, could insert a baseball bat in ANYONE. Let’s not even talk decapitation. Disappearing corpses make perfect sense, given the explanation of what’s really going on, but the physical limitations of the storm/motel scenario should carry with them unbreakable, or at least unbroken, rules. It’s not the Matrix, after all. Nobody’s flying here. All 10 personalities fought for their own survival under the constraints they found themselves in. For Timmy to have done it, he’d have to be the only personality other than Ed to be aware of the exterior reality, and that’s just not supported by the rest of the movie. Psycho ex machina. It reminds me of bad essays written in sixth grade that ended, “But then he woke up. It had all been a dream.” There’s a reason we got D’s for writing those!!!
This movie should so clearly have ended in the drive to the orange grove. Beautiful story arc, good characters, well played. The instant the plot continued, and we saw Paris checking on her Florida clothesline, I had this sinking, horrible, sick feeling that they let Tweety the Intern edit the final sequence, and she couldn’t resist a Friday the 13th moment. And I was right. ARGH!!! Way to hamstring John Cusack’s incredible death scene, Tweety.
Either that or they had test audiences with the IQ’s of hamsters. I feel so ripped off.[/spoiler]
Perhaps when it comes out on DVD there will be an alternate ending, just to make ME happy.
However, I loved Larry’s entire speech about his deep dark secret. Worth the price of the movie for that alone. “So I rented them rooms…they all seemed happy.” I shall choose to forget that the last five minutes of the movie exist. Rather like What Dreams May Come.