The Usual Suspects

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The Usual Suspects
Directed by Bryan Singer
Produced by Michael McDonnell
Bryan Singer
Written by Christopher McQuarrie
Starring Gabriel Byrne
Chazz Palminteri
Kevin Spacey
Stephen Baldwin
Kevin Pollak
Benicio Del Toro
Dan Hedaya
Giancarlo Esposito
Pete Postlethwaite
Suzy Amis
Distributed by Gramercy Pictures
Release date(s) August 16, 1995 (USA)
Running time 106 min.
Language English
Budget $6,000,000 (est.)
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

The Usual Suspects is a 1995 American movie written by Christopher McQuarrie (who earned an Oscar for the screenplay) and directed by Bryan Singer. It stars Kevin Spacey (who won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance), Gabriel Byrne, Chazz Palminteri, Stephen Baldwin, Pete Postlethwaite, Benicio Del Toro and Kevin Pollak.

The film, shot on a $6 million budget, did not create much excitement (or box office) prior to its initial release, but once released it saw favourable reviews and was given a wider release, grossing far more than expected. Despite making the list of Roger Ebert's most hated films, it eventually became one of the most highly-regarded of the crime-drama genre. Ten years after its release, it is consistently found in the Top 20 on the Internet Movie Database's Top 250 films.

Roger "Verbal" Kint (Spacey), a small-time con man, is in a police interrogation, and tells his interrogator, Agent Kuljan (Palminteri), a convoluted story about events leading to a massacre and massive fire that have just taken place on a ship docked at Los Angeles. Using flashback and narration, Verbal's story becomes increasingly complex as he tries to explain why he and his partners-in-crime were on that boat.

Contents

[edit] Plot details

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The movie begins with a man lying on a merchant ship. He attempts to light a trail of spilled gasoline, but it is extinguished by a stream of urine from an unseen personage. The figure then approaches the man on the ship, and the two exchange a brief conversation. The two men seem to know each other, the shadowy man is addressed as "Keyser", and the man lying on the ship as "Keaton". Keaton asks what time it is, and after replying Keyser appears to shoot him twice, (although Keaton is not on screen while this happens), then uses his cigarette to set the ship ablaze, as he makes his escape.

We then cut to Agent Kuljan, interrogating Verbal Kint on the status of criminal Dean Keaton (Byrne), who was involved in the boat fire. Despite reports that Verbal and a Hungarian man who nearly died from burns and assorted injuries are the only survivors, Kuljan seems unwilling to believe that Keaton is dead, and insists that Verbal tell him the full story, despite the fact that Verbal has already made his statements and been granted immunity.

Verbal's story begins with five crooks, who are brought together in a police line-up on trumped-up charges. They are an eclectic bunch: Keaton is a corrupt ex-cop who appears to have gone legit, (and whom the audience recognizes as the murdered man from the first scene); McManus (Baldwin) is a crack shot with a temper and a wild streak, Fenster (Del Toro) is McManus' partner and speaks in mangled English, (so much so that, according to DVD bonus material, even the actors themselves had trouble understanding him), Hockney (Pollak) is a tough talking, attitude-laden professional hijacker who forms an instant rivalry with McManus, and Verbal himself, a diminutive, crippled con artist. One thing is certain: although all of them are guilty of something, they're probably innocent of what they're actually being accused of: hijacking a truck full of gun parts.

While being held, the five suspects join forces to plan the robbery of "New York's Finest Taxi Service"--an armed-escort courier service used by jewel smugglers and run by corrupt NYPD officers. Besides being lucrative, the heist will be the newly-formed crew's revenge against the NYPD. Verbal Kint plans and organizes the robbery so no one is killed, the corrupt cops are arrested, and "New York's Finest Taxi Service" is out of business. Kint, Keaton, McManus, Fenster, and Hockney travel to California to fence the stolen gems.

While in California, their fence, (who is known as Redfoot) suggests another job: the robbery of Saul Berg, a local jewel smuggler. But the robbery goes wrong, and the crew is forced to kill Berg's bodyguards. When Saul refuses to hand over the case of jewels, Verbal kills him and the group leaves. Later, when the crew opens the case, they discover they've been cheated--Berg was smuggling drugs, not jewels.

Furious at being cheated, McManus confronts Redfoot. Redfoot reveals the job was given to him by a lawyer named Kobayashi (Postlethwaite), who now wants to meet McManus and the crew. At the meeting, Kobayashi blackmails them all into doing a job for someone named Keyser Söze by threatening them with his knowledge of their criminal records and Saul Berg's murder. Keaton, Fenster, McManus and Hockney react to Söze's name with a fear bordering on terror, (although Keaton, despite having heard of Söze, loudly insists that there is no such person) while a bewildered Verbal asks who Keyser Söze is. When asked why the five of them have been selected, Kobayashi reveals that at some point in their lives each of the five men has at some time stolen or done some other wrong to Söze's shadowy criminal organization, albeit unwittingly (including the theft of gun parts that brought the men together, which is attributed to Hockney), and the job they're going to do will function as compensation for their debt. Furthermore, it was Kobayashi and Söze who arranged the lineup in New York, with the intention being to approach the five of them there. Unfortunately for their plans, Keaton's lawyer/girlfriend Edie was able to arrange their release too quickly for Kobayashi and Söze to do so.

Meanwhile, during Verbal's narrative FBI agent Jack Baer, a friend of Kuljan's, has been investigating the incident from another angle, by going to the hospital where the only other survivor has been taken. Once there he immediately recognizes the man as Arkash Kobash, a Hungarian gangster of some notoriety. Kobash begins screaming about Keyser Söze and trying to escape in the middle of treatment despite the extremely serious nature of his injuries. Baer is immediately intrigued and quickly arranges to have an interpretor and sketch artist sent in to hear Kobash's account of things and description of Söze, whom he claims to have seen.

At this point, Verbal is prompted by Kuljan to tell him about Söze and who he is. Keyser Söze, as Verbal relates it, is organized crime's version of the monster under the bed. When he was a small-time Turkish drug runner, a rival Hungarian gang tried to seize his territory and business by taking his family hostage, raping his wife and traumatizing his children in the process. Söze, in response, killed his own family and all but one of the threatening gangsters, who is spared in order to carry the news of the event to the rest of the gang. Söze then initiated a brutal vendetta against the gang, systematically eliminating their friends, family, children, lovers, parents, and even their debtors, as well as their homes and businesses before eventually disappearing. He is a criminal mastermind, and his name strikes fear into the heart of even the most hardened of criminals. With time Söze's story has become half myth, with more and more improbable stories added onto the legend. In one of the film's most memorable moments, Verbal describes it by saying "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."

Verbal returns to the narrative and tells about the job Kobayashi wants them to do: on a ship docked at San Pedro, California, (the same ship seen at the film's beginning) two gangs are meeting to finalize the sale of, and then exchange $91 million in cocaine. One of them is an Argentinian group that has contested Söze's underworld empire for some time, and are now trying to recover from the damage of competing with Söze. They are therefore to be prevented from making the sale. If the suspects wait for the deal to be sealed, they may help themselves to the cash the other gang will be bringing to the deal, but this will require fighting through twice the number of guards.

Fenster loses his nerve and attempts to flee; several hours later Kobayashi tells the remaining four where to find his body. The group agrees to try to kill Kobayashi or get him to release them from the job. He refuses to do either despite having a gun to his head, and instead details a chilling list of deaths and mutilations that will befall the people they love the most, including Keaton's girlfriend Edie, whom Kobayashi has already brought out to Los Angeles for business matters.

Spacey as "Verbal" in The Usual Suspects
Enlarge
Spacey as "Verbal" in The Usual Suspects

The suspects turn their focus to the job, and decide to wait for the money to be present. Despite the extra risk they feel that if they are going to risk their lives, they at least want a payoff. Keaton tells Verbal to stay back and flee if things go wrong, which they do; after the heist seems to be on the verge of success, Keyser Söze himself appears and puts an end to all of the remaining suspects, save Verbal himself, who is hiding when he witnesses Keaton's death at Söze's hands. As Verbal tells the story, a new relevation comes to light: Baer finds out that among the many victims is a man named Arturo Marquez. Marquez had previously offered the names of many criminal associates in order to avoid jail time, including that of Keyser Söze. This man has been shot twice in the head, which is Söze's calling card. Furthermore, it is discovered that there were, in fact, no drugs on the ship. Kuljan believes that the whole point of the exercise was not to interrupt a dope transaction, but rather for Söze to kill the man who was going to rat him out.

Kuljan returns Verbal to the crucial point: is Keaton dead? Verbal is sure: he saw Söze pull the trigger for the two head shots. But what was Söze actually shooting at? Verbal's view of Keaton was blocked, and Söze himself just a shadowy figure in a coat seen from a distance. Could he have misread the scene? Could Söze and Keaton be allies, and might Söze be covering for Keaton? (During one of Keaton's criminal trials, Keaton had successfully faked his own death until the witnesses against him died under suspicious circumstances).

It is Kuljan's belief that Keaton is actually Söze, which raises the odd question: why is Verbal, then, even alive? Why did Keaton tell him to run, if his whole objective was to kill anyone who might turn Keaton/Söze over to the police? Kuljan is convinced it's because Keaton wanted Verbal to tell the police the story of how he died, and that Verbal was the only one who wasn't smart enough to figure it out. Verbal breaks down into tears and admits that the whole plan, from the beginning, was Keaton's idea, even the heist in New York for which Verbal had previously taken credit. By this time, Verbal's bail has been posted, and he departs with his legal immunity, deciding to take his chances on the street rather than trust the dubious safety of the Witness Protection Program.

Verbal receives his personal effects from the jail warden: a gold watch, a gold cigarette lighter, and a pack of cigarettes. Kuljan, relaxing in the office he used for the interrogation, suddenly starts to notice details from Verbal's story appearing on objects around the room; most notably, the cups from which they both have been drinking coffee are made by a company called Kobayashi Porcelain. Finally putting the pieces together correctly, Kuljan scrambles outside, just missing a fax with the artist's impressions of Keyser Söze's face (which bears more than a passing resemblance to the now released Verbal Kint). As Verbal leaves the jail, his distinctive limp suddenly disappears, and his contorted, palsied hand straightens out. He flips open his lighter (an action Verbal previously proved unable to do), lights a cigarette, and then steps into a waiting Jaguar limo driven by "Mr. Kobayashi" departing just before Kuljan arrives and sees him. The film closes with two quotes Verbal has told during the course of narrating the story; "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist", and then, describing Söze's disappearance after destroying the Hungarian gang in Turkey "And like that, he's gone."

[edit] Plot Twists

The Usual Suspects includes some major plot twists. Throughout the course of the movie, the plot leads viewers to suspect that Söze is either Keaton or someone who is not a member of the suspects, with the actual answer hitting hard at the end. The film's idea, according to the extras on the DVD release, was to confuse the audience until the very end, when it finally reveals that Verbal is, in fact, Keyser Söze.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Reception

While embraced by most viewers and critics, The Usual Suspects was the subject of harsh derision by some. Roger Ebert, in a review for The Chicago Sun-Times, provided a rating of one-and-a-half stars out four. He wrote in part:

"The first time I saw 'The Usual Suspects' was in January, at the Sundance Film Festival, and when I began to lose track of the plot, I thought it was maybe because I'd seen too many movies that day. Some of the other members of the audience liked it, and so when I went to see it again in July, I came armed with a notepad and a determination not to let crucial plot points slip by me. Once again, my comprehension began to slip, and finally I wrote down: 'To the degree that I do understand, I don't care.' It was, however, somewhat reassuring at the end of the movie to discover that I had, after all, understood everything I was intended to understand. It was just that there was less to understand than the movie at first suggests.
The story builds up to a blinding revelation, which shifts the nature of all that has gone before, and the surprise filled me not with delight but with the feeling that the writer, Christopher McQuarrie, and the director, Bryan Singer, would have been better off unraveling their carefully knit sleeve of fiction and just telling us a story about their characters - those that are real, in any event. I prefer to be amazed by motivation, not manipulation... the 'solution,' when it comes, solves little - unless there is really little to solve, which is also a possibility." [1]

[edit] See also

[edit] Awards

[edit] Trivia

  • The title is a reference to the film Casablanca. On multiple occasions in that movie, when confronted with a crime he does not really want to solve, Captain Renault orders his men to "round up the usual suspects." In The Usual Suspects, such an undiscriminating dragnet is exactly the kind of operation that resulted in the five main characters meeting in a police line-up.
  • Benicio del Toro's delivery of the line "He'll flip ya'. Flip ya' for real." comes straight from the movie Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1989) about jazz pianist Thelonious Monk. Monk says the line himself.
  • The character of Söze is based on murderer John List.
  • The manila envelopes containing the characters' personal biographies are handed out in the order the characters die.
  • The lineup part was originally written to be a serious scene but the actors had been messing about and laughing so much that Singer actually put the funniest version in. (see Breaking character)
  • According to the DVD commentary, the stolen emeralds are real gemstones on loan for the movie.
  • Punk band Link 80 have a song called "Verbal Kint" on their 17 Reasons album.
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
  • The line "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist" may come from a prose poem in the collection Le Spleen de Paris written by Charles Baudelaire: "Mes chers frères, n'oubliez jamais, quand vous entendrez vanter le progrès des lumières, que la plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas!"[2].
  • The scene where the crew meets Redfoot after the botched drug deal, Redfoot flicks his cigarette at McManus' (Baldwin) face. The scene was originally to have the Redfoot character flick the cigarette at Baldwin's chest, but the actor missed and hit Baldwin's face by accident. Baldwin's reaction in the film is real.
  • Over a decade later, Kevin Spacey and Bryan Singer would reunite to work on the film Superman Returns, in which Singer cast Spacey as the diabolical supervillain Lex Luthor.
  • In a poll on IMDb, the movie was voted as having the best plot twist, beating out The Sixth Sense, The Crying Game, and Witness for the Prosecution.[3]
  • An audio clip of Verbal saying "the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist" and "and like that - he's gone" are sampled at the end of the Ghostface Killah song "The Soul Controller."

[edit] Cultural references

  • In one scene of the 1998 comedy Wrongfully Accused, Leslie Nielsen's character, Ryan Harrison, makes up a biography for himself using objects around the room. Similarly, in an episode of Family Guy, Peter Griffin attempts to make up an alias using the same process, but fails.
  • In 2004, Marvel Comics released "Identity Disc", a mini-series in which six villains (Deadpool, Vulture, Sandman, Sabretooth, Bullseye, and Juggernaut) are forced to work together on behalf of a master criminal. Fans decried[citation needed] the book as a complete rip-off of "The Usual Suspects", complete with the fact that Vulture, having told Nick Fury the entire story, is revealed to have been the mastermind behind the scheme.
  • In "The Puppet Show", an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer the Scooby Gang thinks they've been tricked by a dummy, prompting Xander Harris to say "So, the dummy tells us that he's a demon hunter. And we're, like, fine, la la la la. He takes off, and now there's a brain. Does anybody else feel like they've been Keyser Soze'd?"
  • In the computer game Warcraft 3, typing in 'keysersoze' will give the player 500 gold.
  • In episode 22 of the sitcom Yes, Dear's 4th season, the two married couples go to counseling to resolve issues. The main character tells a story of, "why he needs to have control" which is later proved by the doctor to be a fraud. As he walks out of the counselors office, the camera focuses in on his foot, which changes from a limp to a regular step, and he is shown to be grinning.[1][2]
  • In the 31st season finale episode of Saturday Night Live, Andy Samberg explains to guest host Kevin Spacey why he was late for the show. Spacey then discovers that the story was a lie, from items around the room, and through a fax from Samberg with a police-style sketch of his face and the caption "I Lied!".
  • During the ending of Scary Movie, Cindy Campbell sits in the police station trying to make sense of everything, finally realising that the killer is mentally handicapped Doofy Gilmore (after her coffee cup fell down in the same way Kuljan's cup fell down, with Doofy's name printed on its bottom). He is seen walking away and proceeds to shed his outfit and fake mustache, revealing himself not only not handicapped, but actually to be a 'cool' guy who jumps into reporter Gail Hailstorm's car. The two drive off, with the throwing the fright mask out as the final piece of evidence. Having arrived too late to capture him, Cindy stands in the middle of the street, helpless (though, unlike Kuljan, she is run over seconds later).
  • The Usual Suspects inspired Jay-Z's video "The city is mine."
  • Serves as the inspiration of the video of the Common song, "Testify." In the video, a man is on trial for drug-dealing and his wife pleas his innocence. At the end, after he has been convicted and herself cleared, she changes her demeanor, strolling out of the courthouse, smoking a cigarette as a car approaches to pick her up. Then the detective who nabbed her husband runs out of the building and stands, baffled, in the street. Identical to the last few seconds of the movie.
  • In the first Dr. Dolittle movie, at the pound, a dog behind bars confesses "I am Keyser Söze."
  • In an episode of the NBC sitcom Will & Grace, Eric McCormack's character Will says he's watching The Usual Suspects as he never saw who Keyser Söze is before. Then Sean Hayes' character Jack walks in and tells him its Kevin Spacey.
  • The McManus sniper rifle in the video game Saints Row is named after Stephen Baldwin's character, who uses a sniper rifle at one point in the movie.
  • The computer animated film Hoodwinked is a children's movie loosely based on reinterpreting Little Red Riding Hood into a parody of The Usual Suspects.
  • In the Bloodhound Gang song "Take the Long Way Home" they mention Keyser Söze.
  • In the Outkast song "Wailin'" they mention Keyser Söze.
  • Rapper Fat Joe mentions Keyser Soze in his part of the remix of the LL Cool J song, I Shot Ya.
Spoilers end here.

[edit] References

  1. ^ The Usual Suspects at the Internet Movie Database (Movie Connections)
  2. ^ TV.com summary of "Couples Therapy" episode.

[edit] External links

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