The Usual Suspects ***** (1995, Kevin Spacey, Gabriel Byrne, Chazz Palminteri, Stephen Baldwin, Benicio Del Toro, Kevin Pollak, Pete Postlethwaite) – Classic Movie Review 81

A legendary cast lights up the electrifying, brilliantly teasing 1995 thriller film The Usual Suspects, packed to overflowing with intrigue and tension throughout. Kevin Spacey swept to stardom and his 1996 Best Supporting Actor Oscar. 

‘The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.’

A New York truck hijack goes wrong, and five suspects are rounded up and put in a police line-up. They’re played, quirkily and extremely well, by Stephen Baldwin (Mick MacManus), Gabriel Byrne (Dean Keaton), Benicio Del Toro (Fred Fenster), Kevin Pollak (Todd Hockney) and Kevin Spacey (‘Verbal’ Kint).

The film follows the interrogation of Verbal, one of only two survivors of a massacre and fire on a ship docked at the Port of Los Angeles. Many crooks are dead – 27 – in the explosion that destroys the boat.

Chazz Palminteri plays Dave Kujan, the police official at US Customs who interrogates Verbal, and Dan Hedaya is his sergeant, Jeff Rabin. Verbal tells Kujan a convoluted story about events that led him and his partners-in-crime to the boat, and about a mysterious mob boss known as Keyser Söze, who hired them.

Söze apparently planned to eliminate all of them as it seems they’ve all wronged him. But his identity remains a mystery, if he truly exists, though Verbal says he’s the only man he fears.

Then there’s Pete Postlethwaite’s Kobayashi, the mob boss’s henchman, Giancarlo Esposito’s FBI man Jack Baer, Suzy Amis as Edie Finneran and Paul Bartel as Smuggler.

A legendary cast lights up director Bryan Singer’s electrifying, brilliantly teasing 1995 thriller film The Usual Suspects, packed to overflowing with intrigue and tension throughout. It builds and builds to an exhilarating final reel. Puzzle it out if you can. It is probably a lot smarter than you are, but somehow you never blame it for that. It has a plot twist you just can’t see coming, one of the best ever in any movie.

The film is a triumph all round, but for three people especially: Spacey, screen-writer Christopher McQuarrie and Singer.

Kevin Spacey is on fire. He rightly swept to stardom and win his 1996 Best Supporting Actor Oscar, in a triumphant turn as Roger ‘Verbal’ Kint, the pitiful gimp with the limp, apparently brought on by cerebral palsy. Spacey went on to win the Best Actor Oscar in 2000 for American Beauty.

And, if only you could win two of the same Oscars in one year, he should have also won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Seven [Se7en] too in 1996 for his chilling John Doe. But he wasn’t even nominated, and nor was anybody else, apart from the film editor.

Christopher McQuarrie won the best original screenplay Oscar for the sizzling script, setting off an interesting career that’s included some fascinating hits and misses – The Way of the Gun, Valkyrie, Jack Reacher, The Tourist, Jack the Giant Slayer and The Wolverine. The Usual Suspects is still the highlight of his career, though. McQuarrie makes a cameo as a cop at the end of the movie. He took the title from a column in Spy magazine and wrote nine drafts of the screenplay over a period of five months.

It also launched the career of director Bryan Singer, who shoots tautly and very imaginatively. He went to Apt Pupil, X Men, Valkyrie and Jack the Giant Slayer. He also made the ill-fated Superman Returns in 2006 with Spacey as Lex Luthor.

‘Round up the usual suspects,’ says a cynical Claude Rains memorably in Casablanca (1942).

In July 2015 it was announced that the new Usual Suspects comic will reveal the origin of Keyser Söze. Surely a Keyser Söze movie will follow.

© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 81

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