Oversight Marathon: The Usual Suspects (1995)



Sometimes I will sit down, watch a movie, and have the reaction I had to The Usual Suspects.  The movie isn’t a bad movie.  Not by any means.  It’s a good movie; it’s better than average.  Thinking about it, though, it’s not a great movie.  Somehow, over the years, I’ve heard so many stories about how great the movie is that I was led to believe that my mind would be blown by how great it was.  That did not happen.

It might be unfair of me to make this assessment upon my first viewing, when I knew the twist at the end of the movie.  I think it’s completely fair.  Like I said when I saw Citizen Kane, a movie should be able to hold up with multiple viewings when it has a twist ending.  The ending should not help to accentuate flaws within the movie.  I feel that in the case of The Usual Suspect, knowing the twist ending only goes to point out how obvious certain other points are.  Be warned, SPOILERS ARE AHEAD.

If you’re reading right now, you’ve most likely watched The Usual Suspects.  Perhaps you’ve seen it multiple times.  Maybe you’re like me and you saw it once, knowing what the ending was.  You know by now that Kaiser Soze is Verbal.  Verbal is Kaiser Soze.  You also know that a lot of what he said was made up, or at least changed in order to keep certain characters from being incriminated.  Knowing where he gets the names, you can see him, throughout the movie, figuring out what the names will be.  This is mostly at the beginning.  The worst case of this, upon knowing the ending, was when Verbal stared at the bottom of a coffee mug and finding the name Kobayashi.  Yet, it isn’t until about halfway through the movie that he uses the name after being confronted about Kaiser Soze.

Any flaws within the story itself can be attributed to an unreliable narrator.  But that doesn’t excuse the ending, where the police officer assumes that a dead character was Kaiser Soze when Kaiser Soze killed that dead character.  Are we supposed to think that this character killed himself with multiple gunshot wounds?  Is this possible?  Why is the police officer not thinking about that?  I am really confused by that one plot point.

Other than my issues with the plot, the direction, acting, and all of that stuff is good but nothing special.  I don’t know if Kevin Spacey was purposely overacting.  I would like to hope that he was, but I’m not positive.  He has a history of overacting in movies.

I liked The Usual Suspects as a whole, but it’s hard not to notice some of these flaws.  It keeps it at the level of good, rather than great for me.  I don’t quite comprehend why people think it’s one of the best of the 1990s.

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