Tuesday, December 17, 2024

The Usual Suspects Movie Review

The Usual Suspects (1995)

Rent The Usual Suspects on Amazon Video (paid link)
Written by: Christopher McQuarrie
Directed by: Bryan Singer
Starring: Kevin Spacey, Gabriel Byrne, Chazz Palminteri, Stephen Baldwin, Benicio Del Toro, Kevin Pollak, Pete Postlethewaite, Giancarlo Esposito, Dan Hedaya, Clark Gregg
Rated: R
Watch the trailer

Plot
The sole survivor of a pier shoot-out tells the story of how a notorious criminal influenced the events that began with five criminals meeting in a seemingly random police lineup.

Verdict
What a fun movie. It's a movie that's defined by the conclusion, upending everything you thought you knew about this movie. It's a solid, twisting heist movie but the final scene is where this pulls the rug out from under the viewer, giving us a twist that never could have imagined before this movie and with how well this implements the twist, no movie could ever replicate lest their accused of plagiarism.
Watch It.

Review
This is an absolute classic; a movie where the ending makes the entire thing exponentially better. Few movies hinge on the conclusion as strongly as this one.

The police round up a group of criminals due to a weapons truck hijacking for a witness lineup that consists of four criminals and our narrator, Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey). That's the prologue for Verbal being interrogated about a later crime gone wrong at the pier. The cops are sure he knows what happened and more than he's told them. Keyser Soze seems to be the kingpin behind the whole thing. He's the center of what happened at the pier, and he's linked to all five criminals in the line up.

Kevin Spacey plays Verbal Kint

This is the prologue for what happens after the lineup and before the Soze crime. Verbal tells the cops everything that happened after he was put in a lineup with Keaton (Gabriel Byrne), McManus (Stephen Baldwin), Fenster (Benicio del Toro), and Hockney (Kevin Pollak). They team up to pull a job, and that eventually leads to a job from Soze. They all unwittingly stole from him, and now they're in his debt.

Kevin Pollak, Stephen Baldwin, Benicio del Toro, Gabriel Byrne, Kevin Spacey play
Todd Hockney, Michael McManus, Fred Fenster, Dean Keaton, Verbal Kint

Soze is some kind of ghost, he's grown in power because he stays off the radar. As Verbal states, "the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." The cops don't hunt Soze as they don't think there's someone that powerful orchestrating crimes.

Verbal tells the audience and the cops this swirling story of criminals, heists, and kingpins. We're in the same position as agent Kujan (Chazz Palminteri), wondering how much of Verbal's story we can believe, but it sounds plausible. It's a movie you want to watch again to pick apart and find the cracks in Verbal's story. These five guys are roped into a heist that goes wrong, ending up on the dock that we saw in the movie's first scene. Kujan deduces Keyser Soze's identity, breaking Verbal and finally getting him to admit the truth. Kujan promises to protect Verbal, but Verbal would rather take his chances on the streets.

It's what happens next that makes this movie a classic.

SPOILERS


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