The Usual Suspects (1995)

The greatest trick the devil has ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist, - says the personage of Kevin Spacey, citing Charles Baudelaire. Bryan Singer, The Usual Suspects' director has also pulled a great trick by making the world rack their brains to try to guess who the mysterious Keyser Söze was. Hardly had anyone guessed. This is one of those movies, which make people leave cinema halls astonished and constantly asking themselves "How?". How did Singer manage to create such a tangled story with an absolutely unexpected showdown? And how did the actors manage not to go to the background in the movie with such a complicated plot? How could they all tangle us so that we chose different paths all of them being wrong? Two Academy Awards, high ranks in the top10 detective movies of all time, in the lists of best drama movies and in the Top 100 greatest movies – these facts are speaking for themselves and actually need no comment.

The plot revolves in several temporal dimensions. The movie begins with the scene of someone called Keyser killing a wounded person named Keaton and then setting the ship on fire. The following part of the film is mostly represented by the flashbacks of Roger Kint nicknamed Verbal (Kevin Spacey), a swindler who is one of the two survivors in a massacre at the Port of Los Angeles. He and four other men were forced to work for Keyser Söze, a legendary Turkish gangster. Some people consider this man the devil in the flesh; others are sure that he is nothing but the legend and had never existed. Anyway, no one had ever seen this man. The «usual suspects» are: Michael McManus (Stephen Baldwin), a notorious criminal, Fred Fenster (Benicio del Toro), McManus's accomplice, Todd Hockney (Kevin Pollak), a specialist in explosions, Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne), an ex-policeman involved with criminals and Verbal. The five men are blackmailed by Söze΄s agent Kobayashi and agree to blow up a ship with cocaine to the total amount of $91mln. In the course of their night raid Keyser appears on the board and kills the band members one by one. Verbal sees it all from the quay where he was left on lookout.

The Usual Suspects is a movie to watch from the first seconds up to the final credits, otherwise you will certainly miss some important details. This film is a puzzle not only due to its composition, but also due to the fact that it puzzles the spectator. Frankly speaking, in the world's filmmaking heritage it's hard to remember a better brain-twister. Probably, L.A. Confidential is the only one among crime movies to compete with The Usual Suspects in this aspect. There are also some other features uniting these two movies – the noir style, characteristic of the Hollywood detective movies of the '50s, and Kevin Spacey starring in one of the key roles. Many critics especially praise The Usual Suspects for giving the world this strong actor. Kevin Spacey got his first Oscar for the role of Roger "Verbal" Kint in the Best Supporting Actor nomination. Only a couple of years later he reached the culmination of every actor's career being awarded in the most desirable Best Actor nomination for the role in American Beauty.