The usual movie

I recently re-watched The Usual Suspects so that I could do a full-length post on it here, not having done so before. (Hard as it may be to believe, next year will see the movie's silver anniversary.)

The movie starts off in San Pedro, CA, at a ship docked there. (Technically, it's the port of Los Angeles; San Pedro is the part of the city where the port is located.), Something's gone wrong, as gasoline is set alight, a man gets shot by somebody on the ship's bridge, and then there's a giant explosion. It turns out that these two weren't the only ones killed; in fact, there were a whole bunch of dead people in the explosion. One of the only survivors was a man named Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey).

Kint has a past and is already known to the police, who for fairly obvious reasons want to bring him in for questioning. Indeed, it's not just the local police who want Verbal; coming from US Customs is investigator Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri), who leads the interrogation. One other survivor is a badly-burned member of the Hungarian mafia, who gives investigators at the hospital a name, Keyser Söze.

Flash back six weeks, to New York. Kint was brought in to a police lineup on some bogus charge along with four other people: gunman McManus (Stephen Baldwin); Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne), the man we saw getting shot at the beginning; Fenster (Benicio Del Toro); and Hockney (Kevin Pollak). They all do their duty for the lineup but before they get released, they get stuck together, which gives them time to discuss how the police have nothing on them, as well as plans to form a gang of their own.

The gang quickly rises through the ranks, but also comes to the attention of the mysterious, unseen Keyser Söze, a putative Turkish gangster whose backstory is that he had been done wrong by a bunch of Hungarian gangsters, resulting in the death of his family. That is, if Söze is even real. Kobayashi (Pete Postlethwaite), a lawyer representing Söze, asks the gang to do a job for Söze. Or more realistically, telling them to do it and blackmailing them if they won't, pointing out that he has information on them.

So our gang has to go on that boat and scupper a cocaine deal between the Hungarians and the Argentines worth a cool $91 million. Of course, with that much money on the line, there are going to be a lot of people with guns trying to prevent anything from going wrong, and it's going to be a suicide mission for the gang, most likely.

The Usual Suspects is a good movie, although I have to admit I'm a bit nonplussed as to how it's made its way high up on to the list of greatest movies ever made. The plot is complex by design, since it ultimately deals with the question of whether Keyser Söze really exists and, if so, who he is. If you're not paying close enough attention, it's going to be quite hard to follow at times.

The acting is good, although I have to admit that I didn't particularly care for most of the characters. They're violent, selfish, and given to vulgar language. To be honest, however, any dislike is because the characters aren't supposed to be sympathetic; after all they're amoral gangsters playing against every other side. In that regard the screenplay probably got the characters right.

Overall I'd certainly recommend The Usual Suspects; just don't pay attention to the massive praise it's received or worry about whether it's one of the all-time greats.