The Usual Suspects

What’s the Story?

A favorite "guy movie" for its cool crook-talk dialog (filled with swearing) and breathtaking twist at the end, THE USUAL SUSPECTS starts with the finale of a mass-murder/explosion on board a boat in San Pedro, California. Flashbacks and divergent timelines -- and it is rather confusing at first -- fill in the story, as a police detective questions one of the few survivors, a crippled, wimpy con-artist named Verbal (Kevin Spacey). He claims that he and the dead men were all part of an outlaw band centered on Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne), a former New York City cop turned career criminal. Lured to the West Coast for a job, the victims were told they had offended a legendary international outlaw named Keyser Soze, a figure so shadowy he may or may not even exist, and much unsolved malice and mayhem surrounds him. The police are skeptical that nervous, rabbity Verbal could possibly be involved with Keyser Soze, let alone survive a close encounter. But then...

Is It Any Good?

Though it's a story without any "good" guys, in most any sense (one female character, who seems to represent possible redemption, is very marginal and gets coldly killed offscreen), The Usual Suspects remains a transfixing and convoluted film noir thriller that forces the viewer to think through events, maybe watch the movie a second time, to see where the filmmakers and their narrative fooled you. It does paint a picture of a pretty violent world, though, and the degree to which there's any philosophy or morality at work comes from Verbal Klint, who observes that Keyser Soze succeeds because he's willing to go farther and be meaner than other gangsters, and that, moreover, he's like the devil, "whose greatest trick was convincing the world that he didn't exist."

The mythic Soze works his ruthless will through unwitting dupes and hirelings, always staying in the background -- not unlike Voldemort from the Harry Potter tales. Unlike Potter, though, profanity is so thick here you'd swear the ship blows up at the start because of the heavy concentration of f-bombs.