Today I watched The Usual Suspects for the first time since I saw it in the theaters when it came out. I’m one of the few people that didn’t like it and so, seeing as my friend had it on DVD I thought I’d borrow it and give it a second chance. In a word, No, I still don’t like it.
** SPOILER WARNING **
The problem is nearly all of it could be made up. The only things we know for sure is that there were 5 guys in a lineup in NY since the police ask him to start from there. We know Keaton is a bad guy because Kujan tells us about him. We know Verbal is Soze because the guy in the hospital IDs him. We know a boat was on fire and some people died on it. That’s really about it. Everything else could be made up.
Did any scene with the laywer, Mr. Kobayashi happen? Well, we know there is no Mr. Kobayashi since his name was taken from the bottom of a coffee cup. We don’t know if they ever met a Mr. Redfoot since his name was taken from the bulletin board. We don’t know if they really stole the gems from the police taxi service. We don’t know if they really killed one of the 5 early. We don’t know if there was the mess up with the cocain in the briefcase deal either.
In fact we don’t know that the other 4 aren’t still alive. For all we know after the line up they all went to Disneyland, then fled the country while Verbal/Soze went to the dock by himself. None of the bodies were identifiable so we don’t know the other 4 guys were there.
And that in a nutshell is my problem with the movie.
You can’t trust what you are seeing. You could say all those things happened because we saw them but we also saw Verbal cowering on the dock while the other guys were getting killed and we saw him watching from the dock as the last guy was shot. Since we know those particular scenes are lies then it could just as easily be true that every single scene from the lineup on is all fabricated. (n) 
Not knowing is the beauty of the movie; it’s the whole point of this movie. So if you have to know, if you have to trust what you see…I guess this movie really isn’t for you.
Now I’m wondering what other movies are like this–maybe, at the other end of the spectrum, 2001 A Space Odyssey. Did you like that?
**spoiler**
Something I found funny about the DVD of The Usual Suspects was the fact that they had a spoiler on the main menu screen. Behind the “play movie” button, etc, they run quick clips from the movie. One of the clips is the cup (it was a coffee cup, right? I rented it a long time ago…) falling or somehow revealing the manufacturers name.
I had never seen the movie and thought “How is that significant enough to show on the main menu?” So I watched the movie waiting for the cup, knowing it was important somehow.
Not exactly a spoiler, but not a brilliant idea, either.
I liked the movie only slightly better than you, Gregg. Not because of the ending invalidating the rest of the movie. I was expecting something like that. And I usually feel like I’ve wasted 2 hours when I get to the end of any movie, anyway. I didn’t like it because it felt like a Showtime direct to cable movie. Maybe it was Stephen Baldwin, maybe it was the shoot-out at the docks (doesn’t every cable movie have one of those?), maybe it was the way the docks were lit like a high-school play….etc…
** LOTS OF SPOILERS ALERT **
The problem is the movie lied to me. When I watched Sixth Sense, the surprise at the end didn’t invalidate the whole movie, it just changed the meaning. Nothing I saw was untrue. The camera didn’t lie. Same with Fight Club, Unbreakable, The Crying Game etc. The camera never lied, I was just mistaken, I didn’t have all the facts. Once I did I could go back and rethink through all the scenes.
But, in the Usual Suspects, the camera did lie. Because of that nothing I saw had any meaning what-so-ever. We don’t know if any of the characters are actually like that. The only part of the movie that is real is the interview in the office. We don’t know that any of the main characters are anything like they were portrayed. Was Keaton really a hard as rock leadership like person? We don’t know, it’s all made up. Did the conversation in the jail happen? We don’t know, it’s all made up. Did they meet at the Korea Bell in San Padro and get into it with some guy named Redfoot? We know that’s a lie.
I can’t name another movie off hand that lies with the camera except in very short 30 second dream sequences like Buffalo 66, etc where some character dreams he’s doing something one way then snaps out of it and is back to reality.
In Usual Suspects I was told this cool story about interesting people and then at the end I was told it was all made up. When you find out he made it all up then you can’t go back over anything like you can with those other movies. It’s not reinterpretable. It’s just a guy, arrested from an incident with a burning boat, telling a fancy story to get off. All the visuals you are presented with for 90 minutes are immediately irrelavent. That’s why it didn’t work for me
Bad example but….
**SPOILER**
The first movie I remember seeing that had a similar effect is Phantasm. I was probably 13 years old, me and a friend watched it totally absorbed and totally frightened. Then at the end you find out it’s all a dream. In that instant I went from totally frightened to totally unfrightened. I felt cheated. Fortunately as me and my friend were saying “aw man…” the movie saved itself and instantly put us back in scared mode. The only connection to Usual Suspects is like Phantasm I was snapped from absorbed in the story mode to completely uncaring. Usual Suspects didn’t have the snap back though like Phantasm.
i have to ask this…..do you find that when you enter a movie you are saying,..”i really hope that the ending is somthing neat and tidy and, just plain well for lack of a better term movielike.” i for one say no.
i loved the ending of that film BECASUE of the lie. it is just a way to establish how GOOD at lieing cheating stealing, and killing this soze guy is. plus we also have to think that some of the events described would have to have happened, IE: the hit on the police simply becasue it was everywhere on the news and the police were publicly shamed for it. now as to weather or not those men who did the hit were indeed the stories five “protaganists”, is irrelevant, becasue it did happen (the cop would surely have heard if it) but since no one was caught who was he to dispute the story? this adds solidity. also, it could be said that everything fake was meant to throw false trails everywhere, i mean yeah it was an interview but this cop would never just be there for a chat over coffee, he is passing names and places events and dates to his underlings and they are running off trying to bring solidity to the story all the while slowing down the investigation and taking the heat off of the event he is interested in the boat explosion! smoke and mirrors done by a pro is very effective.
but i digress. This is what working at blockbuster for 5 years will do to ya
thought you guys just might like another opinion.
I had the opposite reaction to the ending of Phantasm. As I was watching the movie, I was bothered by things that didn’t make much sense (even for a cheap b-horror movie)(like the kid having to walk across town, and it just happens without effort or time) but I was enjoying the movie because it felt like I was watching one of my dreams (which frequently don’t make sense). I really do have dreams like that, but less horrific, more science-fictiony. The part of the movie where the character sees through the transporter do-hickey is a perfect example of something I would dream, and gave me the same feeling. So when it turned out to be a dream, it felt right. And then it wasn’t a dream…..and it seemed to me like the director was hedging his bet because he was afraid people would feel cheated if it was just a dream.
I still enjoy watching the movie. And to me, it’s a dream.
Another movie that’s diminished by its ending (IMHO) is the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers which, luckily, is so great otherwise. The studio was so afraid the audiences would freak out if the movie stopped at the original ending (where the main guy, having discovered the trucks hauling away hundreds of pods, runs screaming on the highway into the camera), they tacked on the stuff at the very beginning and end that suggests everything will be okay. The tacked on stuff is horribly done and doesn’t at all even look like the same movie. I was hoping the dvd would have the option to show the director’s cut, shaving that stuff off. Maybe someday.
There are plenty of movies I like that don’t have tidy endings. Usual Suspects is the only movie I remember though where the camera lies meaning *watching* the movie had no point since everything you are seeing is false. It’s not Verbal’s dream, it’s not Kujan’s dream, it’s just random scenes based on the story Verbal is making up. For some people that was clearly the point though.
Mulholland Drive?
I thought about it but originally I read some reviews that made it sound like I could skip it at the theater and just rent it later and I haven’t gotten around to it. I love Wild At Heart, I liked Lost Highway, I liked the Twin Peaks series (and I like Dune).
Speaking of reviews, although at the time of this writing, The Usual Suspects is currently #15 on the Internet Movie Database top 250, at least a few other people didn’t get it either.
Okay, I saw it. I found it very interesting. It’s hard to say if I found it good. But, I never felt lied to like with the Usual Suspects.
It’s interesting in that I watched it on DVD and there is an interview with David Lynch by a Japanese correspondant. Mr. Lynch basically says in so many words that he often throws random scenes together and that the movie is meant to be interpreted differently by different people.
** SPOILER **
My interpretation is the blonde girl had her x-lover killed and dreamt the first 85% of the movie before killing herself over guilt. But, being a Lynch movie there’s other issues that don’t fit that interpretation like what did the homeless guy have to do with anything? And what about the Cowboy?
I just noticed Roger Ebert didn’t get it either
As a media and film studies student i have to say you have absoloutely no imagination what so ever! maybe you should just stick to bond films where we always know what is going to happen and there is absoloutely no intrigue or twist! or maybe dumbo would suit ya beter? Either way ya really shouldnt watched such complex films with such hidden meanings if your not really going to read into it
Maybe you should read the comment directly above yours before you try to claim people that didn’t like this movie have no clue about movies.
you don’t see the creative ingeniously factored plot for what it is, not that the camera, as you say, lied to you, but the suave gold-tongue evasion of a genius mastermind. It’s stupid to say the camera lied, there is no camera!! I know, the CAMERA. But you say that the camera didn’t lie in the Fight Club…Did you not get that movie either?!? The whole movie depicted Brad Pitt but in actuality Brad Pitt never even existed..!! Yah he was on CAMERA but the camera was 1st person only showing what was going on in the mind of Tyler Durden. And here the CAMERA was in the mind of keiser soze. The art lies in The realization that the whole story/interrogation was a farce compilation of a few cloudy facts and witty misleading lies that aimed to shed a false light on what few facts they had. all off the top of his head and on cue. never does the audience realize the true identity of the interrogated suspect until the end. If you didn’t get the obvious coffee cup revelation on the 1st time you watched the movie than I know you must of been High to have to watch again because you didn’t comprehend the significance of the mug. Tell’s me that you didn’t get the point of the movie the 1st time therefore creating a calist opinion of the movie due to your ADHD attention span.
the movie is good because all the way through the movie soze was verbal and he made everyone think that he was a cripple and that he was stupid. remember when soze’s lawyer came in and said he has a deal for them to pay back the things they stole from soze and verbal said wait a minute who is soze? he was basicly saying who am I. and its good because verbal made the police man this he was waste of space and that it was keaton when all along it was verbal the unlikeliest person to have been the mastermind of this all was the bad guy. Also the way keaton made everyone think there was no soze was even better because he was basically saying that dont be scared there is no soze to his 4 other companions. but the thing i dont get is if verbal was soze then who was the man looking through at verbal shooting keaton ?
david, that’s exactly my point.
There is no keaton, there is no soze, there is only some guy sitting in a police office telling a story. Since everything he said was a lie and since even the camera lied all you saw in the movie was make-believe. As for as you know the guy sitting in the police station telling this story was sucking a lollypop for the last 10 years.
I agree with this article. Artistically, this film is very well-made, but the twist at the end is no better than ”It was all a dream!”
I think that you guys are missing the point. The camera shots were not attempts to retell the journey that led up to the boat burning, it is meant to be the story and imagination that Verbal constructs. The only scenes shown before he starts to tell the story(at the police station) is of Keaton and MacMaster dieing and a man shooting him. There was never an angle from where Verbal was supposidly at in his story. So the narration before the story follows the truth. Then from then on the story and movie is as truthful as the immigination from a little kid, anything can be true. The movie conisistently and accuartly stays with two parts. This was the true twist in the movie, it revealse how easily the human mind is tricked and diseaved into beleiving everything they see and hear without thinking about all the possibilites that could contrivbute to the overall picture.