Film Review : THE USUAL SUSPECTS * * * *

The Usual Suspects (1995)

CAST Gabriel Byrne, Stephen Baldwin, Kevin Pollock, Pete Postlethwaite, Kevin Spacey, Chazz Palmintari, Benecio Del Toro, Dan Hedaya, Giancarlo Esposito

DIRECTOR Brian Singer

Brian Singer's The Usual Suspects is a mystery in the classic sense of the genre. From beginning to end, the film unfolds delicately, allowing us to absorb the information that is thrown at us.

Gabriel Byrne plays Dean Keaton, a once crooked cop who is trying to go straight. He finds himself in a police line up with four other ex cons that he knows. This seems suspicious to Keaton and he concludes that it is a shakedown. Meanwhile he is forced back into the limelight of crime by MacManus (played by Baldwin), who offers up a job that seems to hard to resist. Kevin Spacey as Verbal Kint is the main character. He tells the story we see on film to a customs agent named Dave Kujan, who is played by the underrated actor Chazz Palmintari. Everything that is happening is past tense. We are getting the story in flashback from Verbal. So what we see, is not necessarily the way the events transpired. This leads me to believe that things could have happened differently than he tells them to Kujan.

The story is brilliant. The direction of Brian Singer is stylish and smart. The performanes are well rounded and convincing. Even Byrne does a good job of acting here, where normally he is stooge like and unconvincing. Here his character has texture and layers to it that make him interesting. Character development is flawless here. We see the five main guys in the line up at the beginning, and we are intoduced to them seperately through Verbal's eyes. This allows us to know the characters individually, before we know them as a group, allowing us to be curious on how they will enter act when they are thrust together. There are big surprises in this film that are not given away early. There is no torch light that shows us the way to the end of this great film. We simply have to writhe in our chairs, anticipating the conclusion to come, which is thoroughly satisfying.