Do not go see The Identical in theaters. It is not worth the minimum-wage hours worked to pay for the ticket. How it managed to be considered the only major release this weekend is beyond me.
Here’s the thing: There are terrible movies that can still be appreciated. Take The Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption (Roel Reiné 2012) for example. The production design looks like it was constructed for an elementary school play. None of the actors could act and, of course, without Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s goofy style, it just isn’t the same.
But I can watch something like The Scorpion King 3 without being completely flabbergasted by it, unlike with The Identical, because the film doesn’t take itself seriously. When a mysterious “Cobra” ninja army and Billy Zane meet in a B-movie, you know you can laugh at it.
With The Identical, though, I was confused as to whether I should laugh, fall asleep or just leave.
To say the narrative is earnest would be a total understatement. A set of twins are separated at birth due to the trials of the Great Depression. One grows up to be Drexel “The Dream” Hensley, a major rock-n-roll blues singer. The other, Ryan Wade, idolizes Hensley from a small town in Alabama while he perfects his own similar talents before going on to do impersonation tours, such as “The Dream.”
The writer and actors wanted this film to have an emotional impact. They failed. The dialogue is overdramatic, and the delivery does nothing to make it less cheesy or exaggerated. The film leans heavily on the “Christian Do-Gooder of the South” theme. It’s used to legitimize movements in the plot and people’s actions, but skirts over the realities of that time.
For example, Ryan and a friend go to a honkytonk in Tennessee. They dance and sing along in a mostly African-American group. When the police show up to address the problematic mingling of the races, the worst the cop says is that it’s “dark” and “smells” there, before persecuting mainly Ryan for taking part.
I’m not buying this. It’s the 1950s in the rural south — and the filmmakers imagine this scene and this cop to be the epitome of hard-ingrained racism? Instead, they imagine this would be enough to make a well-raised white preacher’s kid indignant.
This shows just how seriously this film takes itself. Everything outside Ryan’s world of music and following his dream is either cursory passed over or ignored completely. This is baffling because the film is rooted in historical contexts such as racism, the Great Depression and the tumultuous 1970s.
I wish it could be said that Ray Liotta and Ashley Judd, playing Ryan’s parents, save the film from absolute mediocrity, but even their characters are exaggerated figments of cartoonish proportions. Liotta as the hard-jawed Evangelist father is run-of-the-mill, while Judd is nothing more than a ‘50s-mother cliché of silence and small smiles.
A few times I was able to revel in the muck and laugh; three times, if I remember correctly.
As a collective, whenever Ryan says a line that begins or ends with “momma” or “daddy,” it’s pretty hilarious. It would make for an awesome drinking game.
The entire scene during the finale for the Drexel Hensley sing-a-like contest is just so terrible viewers can’t help but laugh. As the wannabes warble on the stage in spectacularly hideous 1970s getup, the scene cuts to a now older Liotta. His arms are crossed, and his mouth is agape. The dumbfounded look is truly meme-worthy.
When Ryan takes the stage, though, the scene crystallizes as the unintentionally funniest scene of this year, if not this century. Hensley himself enters the building, plops down right next to the judges, just in time for Ryan to sing. The cuts from one to the other are ridiculously dramatic. What makes it even more ludicrous is the amount of ruffles, leather and curly long hair between the two.
The Identical is one of those family dramas that should have settled for feel-good instead. I’d rather have watched The Scorpion King 3.