Identity and Confidence By Justin Remer Justin Remer is an Ohio-born writer and filmmaker, currently living and studying in New York City.

Ten strangers in the middle of nowhere are brought together by mysterious circumstances and are picked off one by one. One cocky criminal decides to pull off the biggest, most elaborate scam of his career. Do either of these plots sound familiar?

Yeah, I thought so.

At first glance, the Ten Little Indians-style thriller Identity has a slight edge over its fellow current attraction, the big-heist flick Confidence, if only because there have been a lot more of the latter than the former these past few years (remember Ocean's 11, The Score, Nine Queens, and Heist? What about the forthcoming The Italian Job?). For this reason, it is a bit surprising that Confidence is actually the more satisfying, if similarly empty, piece of work.

Director James Mangold has traveled a long, strange path from his arthouse debut Heavy to the popcorn-picture likes of last year's Kate and Leopold and now Identity. One has to hand it to him that none of his movies suffer from being repeats of the one previous, but it would sort of be nice if he picked a directorial personality and stuck to it.

Mangold has wrangled a pretty great cast -- including John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Alfred Molina, and many actors from his previous films, Ray Liotta, Clea Duvall, and Pruitt Taylor Vince -- into a decent thriller undone by a banal twist. Ten people are drawn mysteriously to a dingy motel on a rainy night (in a set-up which brings to mind the start of Jonathon Lynn's comic whodunnit Clue -- without the same charm). Then, people go missing and their corpses start to appear... then disappear. Is something supernatural afoot?

The answer is not as interesting as the question would lead you to believe.

Mangold tries to inject some style into the piece by every so often freezing the frame before doubling back to unload exposition only as it becomes necessary, which would seem like a nifty trick, if it wasn't ripped off wholesale from Fight Club (remember all the stuff about Tyler Durden's work history right before the first fight?). Mangold can't be blamed entirely, since writer Doug Jung and director James Foley rip the same thing off in Confidence.

In a scene from that movie, Rachel Weisz walks in the door, ready to meet with her partners in crime, but with one new addition: she's dyed her hair red. The guys flip out, and narrator Edward Burns takes us through a brief history of bad-luck redheads, namely Lizzie Borden, Judas, and his mother, who abandoned him when he was young.

This sequence is Confidence in a nutshell. A bit smarmy, derivative, and self-conscious, but ultimately still amusing.

I won't talk about the plot because once you know what kind of movie it is (big-heist, in case you forgot), you know the movie is about getting the big payday and double-crossing the double-crossed double-crosses. The details are negligible.

Where director Foley succeeds is in the field of magicianship, keeping you focused on his left hand and thinking you know what is in his right, so that you don't see the third hand in between coming until it's right in front of you.

Where he fails is in the job of simple camera placement. For some reason, every scene outside is shot in close-up from across the street with long lenses, with millions of cars passing through the foreground. This bizarre choice is accentuated by the ADHD-influenced editing choice of cutting to a new shot almost every other time one of these cars passes. I honestly had to look away from the screen, it was hurting my head so much.

In the film, Dustin Hoffman's character says, "Style can get you killed." Someone should tell the director.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002