#36 The Usual Suspects

In Summary

For a long time, it has been assumed that when you are watching a film, what you see is what is happening in the world of that film's fiction. The concept that the screen may not be entirely truthful is very rarely explored, The Usual Suspects is a film that helped bring the concept of the unreliable narrator from literature into mainstream cinema.

For the most part, The Usual Suspects seems to be a fairly straightforward tale of a crime gone wrong. Told from the perspective of Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey), a frail, physically-deformed, weakling who is being interviewed by the police after a group of career criminals who had been working together were supposedly murdered by the mysterious Keyser Söze.

Amongst this group of criminals, Kint is clearly the odd one out. The others are confident, attractive and charismatic criminal archetypes, Kint is unable even to hold a gun. While it is suspicious that Kint is bundled together with these criminals, his clear physical deficiencies render him in a position to be the observer rather than the protagonist of the tale.

It is as the story unfolds that the audience starts to get a sense of something not quite adding up with Kint's version of events. Details such as an Irish lawyer going by the name 'Kobayashi' seem jarring, but not quite incredulous.

With one of the most iconic twist endings in recent cinema history, it is soon revealed the extent to which Kint has been playing with the police, raising the question of how much of what we just saw in the film was actually meant to have happened.

A Memorable Quote

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.

Things You May Not Know

• The police line-up scene was intended to be serious, however, the actors struggled to keep a straight face during the multiple takes it took to get the scene. In the end, director, Bryan Singer, decided to go with the outtakes.
• Benicio Del Toro's dialogue was often so incomprehensible, that his fellow actors didn't know when to react to his cues.
• The part of Verbal Kint was written with Kevin Spacey specifically in mind. 

One of the Greatest of All Time?
The twist ending to The Usual Suspects elevates what looks to be a fairly by-the-numbers crime story into something genuinely thought-provoking. The issue I have with this film though is that the large body of the film - the tale of the crime - is not quite compelling enough to be engaging beyond the first couple of watches of this film.

Furthermore, when the twist in the end seemingly renders much of what preceded it to be largely a falsehood, it further reduces the value of sitting through the majority of the film.

Nonetheless, that is not to say that The Usual Suspects is not a genuinely impactful piece of work for how much the ending blindsides you upon the first watch.