13 Brilliant Plot Twists That Couldn't Quite Save Terrible Movies
3. Identity - The Entire Thing Is Playing Out In The Mind Of A Killer
The Twist: After a series of strangers are stuck at a motel during a storm, they start getting picked off one by one. With the suspects dwindling, Ed (John Cusack) begins to notice a series of strange coincidences. Before he can put it all together, he finds himself impossibly transported into a courthouse in the body of Malcolm Rivers (Pruitt Taylor Vince), a serial killer on trial.
Ed is told that he is one of Malcolm’s multiple personalities and that what’s transpiring at the motel is a manifestation of their efforts to eliminate the ‘hostile personality.’ Returning into Malcolm’s mind, Ed believes the killer to be Rhodes (Ray Liotta), and eventually stops him. With Rivers spared, the true killer is revealed to be Timmy, a little boy, who kills the remaining survivors and takes over Rivers’s mind as the lone personality.
Why It Almost Saved The Movie: The twist is so insanely crazy that it almost makes the movie worthwhile all on its own. As a viewer, it makes you immediately forget about the logic behind it or the complete lack of suspense up until that point.
The problem is that the first portion of the twist comes way too early in the film and the film quickly devolves into a generic slasher upon us learning that it’s all in the killer’s head.