‘The Usual Suspects’ Is a Gimmicky Movie Stupid People Think Is Smart

This article contains spoilers for The Usual Suspects.

The first time I saw The Usual Suspects was in 1996. I was a freshman in high school, and I’d taped it off cable. It had already been heralded as a masterpiece when it came out the year before, the next big seismic shift in indie filmmaking. Michael Wilmington at the Chicago Tribune called it a “near-classic blend of mystery, personality, humor and terror, laced with one stunning shock after another,” while Peter Travers of Rolling Stone said it was “the freshest, funniest and scariest crime thriller to come along since Pulp Fiction.” This was in the days before movie reviews aggregate websites, but even now, using those archived reviews, it has 88 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and 77 on Metacritic.

But more than that was the word-of-mouth buzz surrounding it. Unlike the universal praise that gets heaped onto more traditionally “respectable” film-making enterprises like 3.5-hour period pieces, this one actually seemed cool. People in my high school were talking about it as a movie that you have to see, hype generally reserved for, like, Billy Madison or Tommy Boy, not legitimate films getting top-notch reviews from critics.

When I finally sat down to watch it, it seemed fine enough—vaguely badass, in that way every low-budget white guy director back then was aping Tarantino’s fast-talkin’ wise guy dialogue. But when that final scene rolled, and Kevin Spacey twisted his ankle back into working order just as the coffee mug shattered on the precinct’s linoleum floor, I jumped up and down in the basement like my favorite team had pulled off a miraculous last-minute upset. I ran upstairs to my parents. “I may have just watched the greatest movie of all time,” I told them. They remained skeptical.

The second time I saw The Usual Suspects was a week later. I’d harangued friends over for a viewing of that same VHS tape. During the first hour and a half, whenever my friends would start to doze off or lose interest, I’d prod them along. “Pay attention,” I’d say. “It’ll be worth it.” When that ending came again, my friends were ecstatic. “What a goddamn film!” I remember one of them saying.

But I wasn’t as pumped this time around. I got some primal enjoyment out of watching my friends be tricked as I had been, and seeing their faces during that ending, but this time I had a lot more questions throughout. Holes started to develop. If Keyser Söze’s entire complicated scheme was set in motion to kill the guy who was going to ID him, well… wasn’t he just ID’d by that fax that came in at movie’s end with a sketch of his face? Söze lights a cigarette and hops in a getaway car, leaving chaos in his wake as Chazz Palminteri’s Special Agent Dave Kujan figures it all out just seconds too late, but why was he even dicking around at the police station anyway? Kujan said he could go whenever he wanted, and instead of leaving, the master criminal decided to kill an hour messing with a cop?

Anyone who has ever watched even a single segment of a cop procedural or dealt with police in real life knows you have the right to remain silent. It’s actually recommended you do! It’s never a good idea to talk to cops. By choosing to spin a tall tale in literally the laziest way imaginable—by weaving references and names together that he’s pulled from flyers hanging on a wall behind the officer’s desk—Söze is being, as Stormy Daniel’s lawyer Michael Avenatti might say, “very undisciplined,” and hence a gift to those looking to nail him down. There’s no upside to talking for a defendant. Surely the genius criminal we’re to believe Söze is would know this, and put it in practice.

Beyond that, in his original one-and-a-half star review of the film in ’95, no less than Roger Ebert explained that he simply couldn’t follow the plot, even after multiple meticulous viewings with the aid of a notepad. The “blinding revelation” at movie’s end, Ebert writes, didn’t delight him so much as make him wish the movie could’ve just told a good story. “I prefer to be amazed by motivation, not manipulation.” This is something I felt strongly, in college, when I watched the movie for a third time. Absolutely none of the movie matters. Its twist ending makes everything that preceded it pointless, just a bunch of cut-and-paste classic film-noir dialogue for characters created in an Oddball Tough Guy Generator. That was all it took to trick the bro sect and critics not of Ebert’s salt into believing this shit was deep and meaningful.

Twelve years after his review ran, a reader wrote his website to thank him for it. After years of fighting with friends who loved the film, he finally felt seen by someone who, like him, the movie simply “doesn’t make narrative sense.” He writes: “The film is told in flashback via the Kevin Spacey character, and like a lot of movies with flashbacks what’s told concerns a lot of events peripheral to the character’s story (to give background information on the event told), such as conversations between characters that didn’t involve the Spacey character (and which he wouldn’t know about)…

“So in the end when it’s revealed that the story told was a lie, down to the characters names, by Spacey’s character all the peripheral business doesn’t make sense (since in the film’s world it doesn’t exist).”

Great points all, Joseph Brunetta from Santa Rosa, California.

The fourth time I saw The Usual Suspects was in Los Angeles in 2005. I’d just moved into this foreign land and was home sick with flu, and decided to give it another whirl. By then, Stephen Baldwin had pivoted to Jesus and Benicio del Toro’s mumble routine was exposed as a waste of a decent actor. I made it about halfway until I fell asleep. I woke up to see that coffee mug explode, but didn’t care. I began to accept that this adored, Oscar-winning cult hit just wasn’t for me.

I watched it again in February. A lot’s changed since I first saw it. The movie’s then hot-shit director Bryan Singer turned out to mostly be a dud, making a bunch of debatably bad X-Men movies, an undeniable stinker in Superman Returns, and the overlong Tom Cruise snooze Valkyrie. Meanwhile, the screenwriter, Christopher McQuarrie, parlayed this frat house trickery into one of the most jaw-dropping opening scenes of all time, and then a bunch of gimmicky action movies that also star Tom Cruise.

Kevin Spacey, meanwhile, has since been outed as the predator he’d long been rumored to be, and Singer has removed himself from the public spotlight after similar accusations. And though, depending on where you fall on the whole art versus artist debate, that may not weigh on how you feel about the content contained within The Usual Suspects, the recent revelation that the set was temporarily shut down due to Spacey’s behavior is pretty hard to forget while watching it now.

This last time I watched The Usual Suspects I was high, and throughout was mostly just upset McQuarrie didn’t use his blank slate, where the first hour and a half literally doesn’t matter, to do something—anything—interesting or cool. Put in a magician, add a talking lion, who cares, go nuts. “What a waste,” I thought. (It was really good weed.)

I was upset at the generation of suckers who allowed gimmicky schlock to trick them into thinking there was something profound or clever about its paint-by-numbers bullshit. It was this hype, and its place as some Generation X cultural touchstone, that had me, like the reader who found solace in Ebert’s words, returning to the well so many times to try to find what I was missing. But no more! Fool me five times, I won’t get fooled again.

Turns out, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was making anyone think this movie was groundbreaking.

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