In short: Identity (2003)

Ten people (among them characters played by John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Ray Liotta, John Hawkes and Clea DuVall) find themselves stranded in a small Nevada motel during a rainstorm that makes the roads leading in and out impassable. Which would be trouble enough, but there’s also the fact that one of them is a killer who begins murdering their way through the group, leaving behind a numbered motel key with each victim counting down from ten..

There are increasing hints that something more and stranger is going on than a less cosy update of the classic murder mystery formula.

That something turns out to be at once perfectly ridiculous and perfectly awesome, so much so, I don’t really feel the need to spoil James Mangold’s movie to anyone who hasn’t seen it after twenty years. So let’s just say the film has some rather peculiar ideas about how certain mental illnesses and their treatment work, but these are the kind of peculiar ideas that make for a fine, twist-heavy thriller.

Michael Cooney’s script is wonderful, pacing out small reveals and clues in perfect rhythm while playing around with the kind of traditional murder mystery structure that typically becomes just that decisive bit more interesting when a film begins having a bit of fun with its clichés and its normal structure. The final reveal makes it possible that not everything that’s going on needs to make a hundred percent real world sense, which does add further opportunities for structural and formal playfulness.

Mangold’s direction is slick and state of the art of 2003, but unlike other contemporary directors working on this technical level at the time (see the insufferable films of Tony Scott), he is able to use the gloss to create a specific and particular mood – in this case, a glossy yet also miserable and dark all-pervading wetness, the feel of safety always on the brink of breaking down, which feeds excellently into the mood and tone of what’s going on on the surface, as well as below.

Identity is a fine piece of work all around, technically accomplished, clever if a bit silly, tense and fun, with a great cast, and not a single boring moment in it.

Three Films Make A Post: A simple trip to Mars will become the journey of a lifetime

Kung Fu Elliot (2014): Depending on one’s position this film about Newfoundland’s very own self-made action hero and delusional dreamer turned manipulative asshole is either a pretty dull mockumentary (for once, I like the this term for a movie), or a documentary made by filmmakers who are either manipulative sociopaths themselves or completely incompetent. The filmmakers seem to insist on this being an actual documentary, which makes them look terrible: either, they begin a documentary with no research whatsoever on a subject, or they know things they only disclose to some of their subjects later own for maximum cinematic impact while egging on a guy who certainly is a manipulative liar but also psychologically not well at all, only to turn on him with the most hypocritical moral outrage imaginable.

If I had made this, I’d insist on it just being a very dull fake variant on American Movie, but if people insist on looking bad, who am I to disagree?

The Housemaid aka Hanyo (1960): I’m rather less happy I didn’t find much to connect with in Kim Ki-young’s classic of South Korean cinema. This is, after all a highly influential film on many of my favourite filmmakers from the country. Sometimes, I can appreciate the subversiveness of the film, and nod sagely at its social criticism, but for much of the running time, I found myself appalled at the melodramatic gyrations of plot and characters, none of which ever rang true to me even in the heightened realm of the emotional eleven this takes place in.

On an abstract level, Kim’s filmmaking is clearly stylistically very interesting indeed, but at this point in my movie watching career not in a way that works for me.

Cocaine Bear (2023): Then there’s this thing, a movie about a cocaine snorting serial killing bear that somehow manages to contain more continuity problems and gaffes than any film not shot in a backyard has any right to have. Also there and accounted for are gratingly unfunny humour, acting that’s all over the place and a script that’s trite, in love with an intelligence that’s never actually on display, and full of amateurish pacing problems.

From time to time, director Elizabeth Banks stumbles upon a cool gore gag or two, or manages to get a decent character note out of a cast – Keri Russell, Ray Liotta in his final role, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and so on – that could and should do so much more. Of course, as weirdly as this thing is edited, I’m not convinced coherent and great performances haven’t been left on the cutting room floor.

In short: Unforgettable (1996)

At the time it came out, neo noir specialist – who would eventually and somewhat tragically become a mere dependable TV show episode hired gun -John Dahl’s follow-up movie to his brilliant The Last Seduction was a total flop: a commercial dud that was also hated by the critics. Though, to be fair, the latter problem seems to have been with Ebert and Co.’s inability to get over the film’s “contrived” set-up, the sort of thing this genre viewer hardly bats an eye at because he understands that contrived set-ups are what nearly all thrillers have. Or would anyone call the plots  and basic ideas of brilliant movies in the genre like Psycho or Vertigo anything but contrived? Indeed, one might find one of those “metaphors” professional film critics may have heard about here. May there be something a film has to say about grief in the tale of a man (Ray Liotta) trying to catch the murderer of his wife with the help of an experimental drug that makes one relive the memories of other people but demands a heavy physical and psychological price?

Now, having said that, I also have to warn the prospective viewer that this isn’t a secret thriller masterpiece on par with its director’s best movies. The problem’s not in the script’s set-up – contrived or not - nor is it Dahl’s love for pretty wonderful and slightly surreal big set-pieces. The film’s actual major flaw is a badly paced third where Liotta’s drug-induced flashbacks become too long and much too detailed, explaining way more than is necessary of the things even the dumbest audience member will have already inferred and dragging the film down to a crawl. Which is something no thriller can afford. It’s honestly nothing that couldn’t have been fixed by cutting about ten minutes of film and rewriting ten more, but it’s still surprisingly damaging for the effect of Unforgettable as a whole.


I still find a lot to like about the film, though, be it Liotta’s all-out performance that does seem to aim for the same spot of exalted, intense yet secretly precise overacting that Nicolas Cage hits so wonderfully these days, Dahl’s against type casting of Linda Fiorentino as a much too nice and cooperative scientist she really seems to get into, or how enjoyably contrived the first two thirds of the film are.

Three Films Make A Post: Fight back or die.

Harry Brown (2009): For a time there, Daniel Barber’s film about an elderly ex-marine turning vigilante played by Michael Caine, had me thinking it was trying to say something actually interesting about the rights, wrongs and consequences of vigilantism but in the end, it all turns out to be your usual reactionary fantasy about killing the poor and the supposed inefficiency of the law in doing that, not exactly something I have much of a taste for when it doesn’t go so over the top I can stop taking it seriously. This one doesn’t go over the top, but it is also just not terribly great as a crime thriller. The only truly memorable thing is a performance by Caine that suggests a load of emotions and ideas that don’t actually seem to be in the script, Caine showing a touching vulnerability that doesn’t often ring this true in movies about aging and elderly men of violence.

Gosford Park (2001): Keeping with great old men, this is one of Robert Altman’s final films as a director (and his last truly good one, I believe). Usually, the idea of an American playing with elements of the British country house mystery suggests a bumbling tourist not getting anything about class, but this being Altman, that fear didn’t even come up for me. And rightly so, for Altman uses the form (well, the parts of the form that interest him – this is a film that’s half over before the murder happens, and rightly so) to not just explore the British class system between the wars, or the way it already shows cracks, but is most concerned about the way the lives of people intersect in a society that puts the borders between the rich, the poor, and the working rich particularly high, finding heart-breaking moments that prove a murder to be much less important than basically everything else going on around it. Altman also has time for moments of acerbic whit, nods to popular culture of the age (Ivor Novello is one of the characters, as well as a fictionalized producer of Charlie Chan films), all filled with life by a thoroughly brilliant cast and by his accustomed way with organizing large numbers of characters in an intellectually and emotionally impactful way.


Narc (2002): Joe Carnahan’s neo noirish crime film about a former undercover cop (Jason Patric) who accidentally killed a baby during a wild shoot-out pressed into investigating the murder of another undercover cop, and teaming up with the other undercover’s former friend (Ray Liotta), a man even more damaged and violent – and possibly worse – then himself is certainly not a Robert Altman film in style or thought. Apart from a handful of scenes when Carnahan falls into the worst kind of “hey, look at me! I have a digital editing suite” filmmaking, this is a wonderful film. Heated, grim, and appropriately violent, Narc portrays the characters’ world as a cesspool of cruelty and corruption yet also finds time to give even the most minor drug dealer a human personality, does good by fantastic lead performances and also has a really well-constructed mystery at its heart whose solution plays expertly with the audience expectations of the genre savvy without feeling smug.