Roger Ebert’s review intrigued me, but money is tight in my house and I can only afford to see X2 and The Matrix: Reloaded over the next month.
A brief plot synopsis and a detailed ending synopsis would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Roger Ebert’s review intrigued me, but money is tight in my house and I can only afford to see X2 and The Matrix: Reloaded over the next month.
A brief plot synopsis and a detailed ending synopsis would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
I might see it tonight. If I do I will report in monday.
I’m going to bump this, since I originally posted it so early in the day.
Save your money!
Started off ok. Got good. The it got better. Then it got really interesting. Then it got exciting. Then came the big let-down.
Do you really truly want it spoiled?
Lemme try a spoiler box…
All of these terrifying and interesting events were happening inside the mind of a guy with multiple personality disorder. So none of it was actually real. I thought it was a major cop-out. Did you start caring about the characters? Too damn bad. They never really existed.
Sorry. I should have done as asked.
Brief synopsis:
SET-UP
[spoiler]*Travellers on a really horrible, somewhere-beyond-rainy night. A chauffer named Ed (John Cusack) driving a “didn’t you used to be” kinda actress named Caroline Suzanne(Rebecca De Mornay). A kind man (George), his nice wife (Alice), and his quiet step-child (Timmy). A woman named Paris in a convertable on her way to a new life. A young couple named Ginny & Lou, married for only a few hours.
*George & Alice get a flat tire. Alice is standing outside the vehicle amusing Timmy while George changes tire. Ed is trying to drive through the storm while Caroline demands that he look through her bag for her cell phone battery. Hits the Alice, who is standing on the road.
*Ed stops, tries to save the woman. No working cell phones, tries to drive ahead to get an ambulance. Bridge ahead is washed out. Bridge behind is washed out. Only thing on the road is a ratty roadside motel. After much of this & that, all the travellers wind up there. Alice is alive, but bleeding badly and unconscious.[/spoiler]
REALLY ABBREVIATED MIDDLE PART
[spoiler]They all wind up at the motel. No working phone. A guy named Rhodes, who is transporting a dangerous prisoner to a new prison. Caroline’s head is found in a dryer, along with the motel key for room #10. Then Lou dies, with the #9 key. The prisoner is killed, and has key #8. Much excitement, many suspenseful moments interspersed, different people suspected along the way. Larry, the guy who runs the motel, is trying to flee the scene after being suspected, and accidently kills George with his truck. Later, we find that George is holding key #7. Alice dies, presumably from her wounds. The #6 key is under her bed. It is found that everyone there has/had the same birthday.
*In the meantime, we keep seeing scenes of some officials trying to decide the fate of an unseen prisoner heading for the electric chair. We don’t know if this is happening in real time, or if all of the motel scenes are flashbacks.
*Ginny & Timmy die when trying to flee in her car. Explosion.[/spoiler]
ENDING
[spoiler]We finally see the face of the prisoner. Don’t recognize him as someone from the motel. Then he starts speaking as Ed. Turns out he has multiple personality disorder, and they’re trying to get an 11th hour stay of execution on the basis that the personality that did the killings no longer exists, or at least won’t be after this session. His personalitys are being pared down, and that’s why people keep dying in his “motel” reality. Ed is “sent” on the mission to kill the killer, which appears to be Rhodes. Rhodes isn’t really transporting a prisoner. Turns out they were both prisoners, and they managed to kill the person transporting them. Rhodes kills Larry. Ed and Rhodes have a shoot out, resulting in both of them dying. Paris is the lone survivor.
*Whats-his-name gets his stay of execution, and gets transported to a mental hospital. In his mind, Paris makes it to her orange grove, and appears to be living an happy life. Then Timmy appears out of nowhere. We see flashbacks of how he orchestrated all of the murders, and didn’t really get blown up. That’s when the real guy overtakes the guys transporting him to the mental hospital, and presumably escapes. Paris presumably dies, leaving the guy with only the one personality - the kids Timmy.
Fade to black…[/spoiler]
Is the movie gory at all? I am interested, but I don’t deal well with icky.
Depends on your definition of gory. By my definition? Not really. Some bleeding on one person. A couple of shots of Ed stitching up a wound by hand. Blood splatter here and there. Shots of the victims, but not excessively long or gratuitous, IMHO.
Basically, probably a dozen reasonably gory shots throughout, but it was mostly a suspense movie, so the gory shots weren’t really highlighted. You could easily close your eyes during the gore, and not miss much.
I did not see this, yet, but I am going to in about an hour. Waste of cash?
Cant be any worse then House of 10,000 reasons to hate Rob Zombie.
I was severely disappointed with this movie.
I didn’t mind that it was all an hallucination playing out inside Malcom’s mind but they revealed that MUCH TOO SOON!
Had they revealed it AFTER the climactic shoot out between Cusack and Liotta’s characters it would have been much more effective and I would have left the theater loving the movie. But to reveal the secret so soon made it impossible for me to care about the climax or the characters involved anymore.
I just saw “House of 1000 Corpses” and then “Identity” immediately afterwards. While “Identity” is clearly the better picture, both of them kinda suck.
I’m not all that clever, but I knew the “big twist” in “Identity” practically before the opening credits were over with.
Darn it. Lost my first post to a mis-timed keystroke.
I’m eschewing spoiler tags, since ‘spoil’ is in the title.
I liked the movie. I wasn’t impressed by the trailer and assumed it was going to be a fairly shallow psycho killer flick, but it was a pleasant surprise that turned out to be more complex than that. I thought the cast was decent, with some familiar faces from The X-Files, Good Morning, Miami, and Scrubs.
I figured out the major twist when the corpses disappeared suddenly. And though I suppose you could figure out the twist within minutes, based on the sequence with the psychiatrist listening to the taped interviews, I thought the movie fed you enough red herrings as it progressed to keep you from feeling you knew what was going on. Sure, given the setup, there were a finite number of ways it could have resolved, but you can say that about any movie. There have been and will be more predictible movies than this one.
I disagree; I think they revealed it at the right time. Had Ed not known who they all were prior to the shootout, the shootout might have never occurred. Ed needed to know who they were and that the “killer” personality had to be eliminated in order for the events to have escalated to a shootout, and for it to make sense. At the time Ed caught up with the others, after his revelation, Paris had discovered who Rhodes really was, and Rhodes found out she knew, and was chasing after her. But keep in mind that Ed never saw the dead cop in the trunk, or Rhodes’ file in the glove compartment. He only came to Paris’ defense and killed Rhodes because he believed Rhodes was the killer personality. He never learned why Rhodes was chasing her. He simply killed the one most likely to be a murderer among them.
You can disagree that they revealed it at the wrong time, but you can’t disagree that it ruined the ending for ME. It may have worked for you, but for me and the friend with whom I saw the movie, it killed it like a bullet to the head. It was as if a huge drain plug had been pulled and all the suspense drained right out of the movie.
I count four “Identity” threads on the first 2 pages, so far.
I agree with BlackKnight on all counts. Identity is not worth 9 bucks, and I figured out the damn twist over the opening credits. But it doesn’t suck nearly half as hard as “House of 1000 Corpses”, no sirree!
If you like noir-ish movies about grifters, see “Confidence”. Excellent.
RikWriter, the “I think they revealed it at the right time” half of that sentence makes it clear that I’m not disputing your assessment of your own feelings, but that I am disagreeing with your opinion that they revealed the twist too early.
Why on earth would I disagree with your assessment of your own opinion?
Glad to see someone else picked up the ball on this one. I ended up losing the battle with Miss Fried and had to go see “A mighty wind”… oh well. It appears by the majority of opinions so far that I didn’t miss anything. I think I will wait till it comes out on video.
Sucked, sucked, sucked. But at least they called it multiple personality syndrome, rather than schizophrenia. Of course, it wasn’t exactly a convincing portrayal of MDS, but what the hell. I thought it would be a lot more interesting than it was.
What would have been cool is if the MDS guy did not, in fact, have MDS, but was somehow channeling the personalities of the people at the hotel. If those had all been real people, and the MDS guy a misunderstood psycho of a different sort, I would have cared that the hotel people died and that his execution was stayed. As it was, I didn’t give a shit.
Also, I figured out that the kid was the “killer” early on. What a dumb movie and waste of time.
I liked it a lot. I too figured out the multiple personailty thing early, but only because I heard the birthday comparison line on the radio. And the final twist caught me by surprise. I knew there would be one, of course, but didn’t guess it before it happened.
I think it worked out well, and I agree wtih Ebert’s assessment. Not a great film, but a fun and different ride, with some nice, creepy moments. BTW, lolagranola, the prisoner was at the hotel. He was the body of the former owner in the fridge. Symbolic, I think, of the fact that his true self was dead and all these personalities had “moved in”.
I liked the film. Not a great film but enjoyable and it was really nice to have some decent actors in this type of film.
I loved all the red herrings they threw at you. Most people are trying to figure out who is the killer in the group but when the group has;
Ray Liotta Isn’t he always a bad guy?
Jake Bussey Acting Crazy and he is an escaped killer
A child who does not speak Kids who don’t speak = bad
A guy modled after Norman Bates being modled after Norman is not good
John Cusack recites poem that the killer knows
So that was fun.
Ok so you know that all these ‘people’ are different personalites within a killers mind. ONE of these personalites is THE killer. However with ‘intergration’ the weaker personalites are getting killed off. For some stupid reason if the killer personality is done in and a non-killer personaity is left the real-life killer will not be executed. Huh?
What bothered me after watching is that I could see the some of the various personalites being invented by an abused child. The doting ‘perfect’ parents, the raging killer, the trickster (ray), the fallen angel, (cusack) even the movie star, (command respect and has loads of cash) and the ‘whore’ (his mother?). But the young couple don’t really fit in or even seem to be necessary to the plot except to add to the body count as we ‘need’ 10 people.
But I did like it. (note, I got in free so I can’t feel ripped off)
I got free tickets and felt like I was ripped off.
However, a woman at work really liked it. (I will never believe her review of films again.)
It started off so good…and then, fizzled to mess.