The Usual Suspects
A group of common criminals is chased by a legendary murderer in an effective film by Brian Singer.
“Round up the usual suspects,” ordered Captain Renault (Claude Rains) at the end of Casablanca. It probably wasn’t that line that inspired the screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie and the director Bryan Singer, but The Usual Suspects follows the same idea.
The usual suspects are, as the name suggests, well know convicted criminals, who the police arrest when they need to show results for some investigation, even if they have nothing to do with the crime.
That’s exactly how this movie begins. After a truck hijack, the police arrest five usual suspects, among them Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey).
Angered with the police’s treatment, the group decides on revenge, planning a hijack against a jewelry trafficker with ties to the police.
The successful scheme leads the group to more robberies until they finally get involved with Keyser Soze, a legendary criminal, very dangerous and feared, whom everybody calls “the devil.”
The whole movie is told in flashback by Verbal Kint during an interrogation by Agent Kujan (Chazz Palminteri), who desperately tries to convict a member of the heist group and ex-cop, Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne).
Little by little, the complicated plot starts to unveil and it becomes clearer that Keyser Soze is directly participating in everything. Who he is and what he really wants from all these small criminals will only be revealed at the end.
Brian Singer’s movie follows the style of a classic noirish crime story. His directorial work is effective as the whole cast evinces, with special mentions for Benicio Del Toro, in his times before his fame and Academy Award brought by Traffic, and for Kevin Spacey, who was awarded with his first Academy Award as “Best Supporting Actor” for his work.
The most famous aspect of this movie, however, isn’t the director’s work or the plot, it’s the end, actually a twisting end, that changes everything we understood before. So you’ll probably have more fun if you forget about trying to follow the plot, and watch the movie asking yourself, “Who is Keyser Soze after all?”
Written by: Edward Olivier
Reviewers Rating: 8
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Added: 14-May-2007
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