It’s difficult to review “The Usual Suspects” without giving too much away about the movie. Famous for its twist ending with few clues and Kevin Spacey’s constant narration in the form of a police interrogation about his involvement with an explosion, a large-scale crime murder, and a fictional dope deal.
The first words I said while watching “The Usual Suspects” were during the opening credits: Oh no, a Baldwin.To Stephen Baldwin’s credit, his performance as McManus was not insufferable. The entire cast, and particularly Gabriel Byrne, Kevin Spacey, and Dan Hedaya, put out a terrific performance that built into a movie that left its audience going “Wait a minute…what the hell happened here?!”.
The interactions of the five men comprising the “Usual Suspects” for which the movie is titled were always laced with the right amount of humor and slight irony, best demonstrated during the police line-up and interrogation scenes during which everyone but Byrne and Spacey are cracking jokes and laughing. The scene in which one of the company has been murdered and is being buried by the remaining four in the sand by the Pacific Ocean could have been much better, but makes a good moment as it stands nonetheless. The muted, overlayed camera work used when Spacey relates a story of Kaiser Soze’s past is highly effective for the rather sickening scene. (If anyone knows how Soze’s first name is spelled, please enlighten me. AllMovies.com spells it “Keyser”, but the German word is spelled “Kaiser” and it is mentioned that Soze’s father was German -Webmistress).
I may have gone into “The Usual Suspects” with an unfair advantage- I knew that Soze would not be the person we were led to believe he was. I was not, like years of audiences before me, “Soze’d.” Advantage or not, I enjoyed guessing my way through “The Usual Suspects” immensely. A word to the wise: don’t watch it with the commentary on the first time you see it. No, I wasn’t that stupid- I watched it straight-up and then with the commentary, which makes everything clearer.
Well, almost everything.
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