Overall Rating
  Awesome: 81.94%
Worth A Look: 9.69%
Just Average: 4.85%
Pretty Crappy: 0.44%
Sucks: 3.08%
4 reviews, 203 user ratings
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Usual Suspects, The |
by Ophelia13
"Actually, no. I am Keyser Soze."

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The Usual Suspects has enough plot turns to make you really dizzy... but unless
you’re stupid, Keyser Soze himself is worth the headache. So who is Keyser Soze?
You won’t hear it from me.A big boat goes boom. There are 27 dead bodies, and $91 million in drug money. Then there’s Verbal Kint. He was there. He saw it go down, and somehow he’s still alive. So’s a very lucky Hungarian terrorist. The Hungarian terrorist’s luck is subjective, really. He’s been barbecued, and someone named Keyser Soze is after him. This Soze fellow would evidently like to finish the job. But that’s not where our story begins.
Our story begins 6 weeks earlier, with a police lineup. There’s McManus (Stephan Baldwin) and Fenster (Benicio Del Toro), partners in crime. There’s Keaton (Gabriel Byrne), a restaurateur with something up his sleeve. Then Hockney (Kevin Pollak) a mechanic, and our poor little cripple, Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey). All of them are brought in for the investigation of a truck highjacking. They haven’t really got that much in common, besides the whole “criminal record” thing. They are The Usual Suspects.
Evidently the truck belonged to one Keyser Soze, a really mean Hungarian who is actually considered a myth. No one’s ever seen him, no one knows when they do business with him. But he’s there. To pay the ol’ boy back, our heroes are sent on a suicide mission. So off they go, dying all the way, and killing right back.
Our director, Brian Singer, really did an admirable job here. We’ve got good character development. The narrative style has a certain flair. A few of the cinematography shots squeeze feeling into an area that would otherwise be muddled. But most of all, he makes us wonder. Who is Keyser Soze? That’s really the only important thing here, finding out who he is. Do you know right off? Maybe. Maybe you’ve got a hunch all the way through. But how can you be sure? How can you be sure he’s even there? Whether he even exists?
To be perfectly honest, most of the cinematography isn’t that impressive. Some of the script is superfluous. And there isn’t a person acting in this film who isn’t hamming it up nearly to the point of irritation. But at least they’re good at it.
Here we have a movie with Chazz Palminteri, Pete Postlethwaite, Benicio Del Toro, Kevin Pollak, and Kevin Spacey. Now you want it to be understated? Wrong movie, wrong casting. But The Usual Suspects works when it’s over the top. The subtlety isn’t in the performances, it’s in the plot. And that’s something we don’t see enough of.“To a cop the explanation's always simple. There's no mystery to the street, no arch criminal behind it all. It if you find a body and you think his brother did it, you're gonna find out you're right.”
link directly to this review at https://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=1533&reviewer=130 originally posted: 04/16/00 14:37:26
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USA 15-Sep-1995 (R) DVD: 28-Nov-2006
UK 25-Aug-1995 (18)
Australia 19-Oct-1995 (MA)
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