08/31/09 - The Usual Suspects

The Usual Suspects (1999, 106 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114814/

I had narrowed down what I wanted to watch today to three choices. Through random selection, The Usual Suspects was chosen. I also looked and saw it was pretty highly rated on the IMDb Top 250 which (though taken with a grain of salt) usually indicates a quality movie so I was pretty excited.

The film follows the life of a five criminals. These are (in alphabetical order by actor): Michael McManus (Stephen Baldwin), Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne), Fred Fenster (Benicio Del Toro), Todd Hockney (Kevin Pollack), and Roger Kint (Kevin Spacey). The movie revolves around Spacey's Kint being interrogated and recounting the events of the past couple weeks involving the group. He is interrogated by Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) of US Customs.

The acting here is clearly headlined by Spacey. Though apparently he was nominated for and won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor (I guess Byrne would be considered the main actor), his performance is far and away the best thing of the film. Though it's not surprising, really, that Spacey is amazing. He's quickly becoming one of my favorite actors. He's excels at playing the calm and intelligent criminal and does another fine job here. Byrne's performance is also noteworthy as Keaton. The rest of the cast is good and everyone plays their character well, but Byrne and Spacey are on another level.

It's hard not to enjoy watching this film. It's set up in a manner where it just seems like a ride as you see everything develop. The pacing is extremely well at just under two hours as it never feels like it's taking to long to drive home a certain point. There's lots of scenes, lots of development, and lots of interesting characters that are introduced. However, this also is a problem in my mind. The only character I really felt for was Spacey's Kint. Besides Keaton, none of the other "usual suspects" really had enough back-story for them to be that memorable of a character. Sure, they were interesting to watch on screen, but will I remember any of them in a month's time when I look back on this movie? Probably only Kint. Even the sub-plot with Keaton wanting to "go straight" and all that seemed to fall flat and I felt it was kind of halfway explored. It was mentioned, referred to frequently, but never developed enough to make me care that much for him.

Also worth noting in its own section is the "twist" at the end. It's meant to be a shock, meant to make you want to watch the movie a second time. Unfortunately for me, I'd been spoiled this twist before my viewing. Even with that, I didn't feel like there were enough clues to allow a viewer to decipher the twist on a first watch. I hate when a movie does this. At the end, the viewer is supposed to be wowed at everything and all the clues. But really the clues come at the end when Kujan sees everything and realizes it. Sure the twist makes the movie pretty cool, but not really allowing the viewer to discover this takes away from it a little in my opinion. Though I am under the impression that a second viewing with complete knowledge of how everything plays out would make this movie really enjoyable. Maybe one day.

Overall, I gave this film a 6/10. It's fun to watch, but a lot of the aspects of a great movie fall flat here and I was really disappointed. The characters aren't that memorable besides Spacey and the surprise ending is perhaps overpraised in my opinion.

[Note: Due to a voting update, I have changed the rating of The Usual Suspects to a 7/10.]