The Usual Suspects

The Usual Suspects is a 1995 American movie written by Christopher McQuarrie (who earned an Oscar for the screenplay) and directed by Bryan Singer. It stars Kevin Spacey (who won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance), Gabriel Byrne, Chazz Palminteri, Stephen Baldwin, Pete Postlethwaite, Benicio Del Toro and Kevin Pollak.

The film, shot on a $4 million budget, did not create much excitement (or box office) during the movie's initial release (even making the list of Roger Ebert's most hated films). Word-of-mouth later made it one of the most highly-regarded of the crime-drama genre. Ten years after its release, it is consistently found in the Top 20 on the Internet Movie Database's Top 250 Movies list (Currently at #15).

Roger "Verbal" Kint (Spacey), a small-time con man, is in a police interrogation, and tells his interrogator, Agent Kujan (Palminteri), a convoluted story about events leading to a massacre and massive fire that have just taken place on a ship docked at Los Angeles. Using flashback and narration, Verbal's story becomes increasingly complex as he tries to explain, to Kujan's satisfaction, why he and his partners-in-crime were on that boat.

Plot details

The movie begins with a man being killed on a merchant ship. The murderer has a gold cigarette lighter and twice shoots a victim in the head before using spilled gasoline to incinerate the boat.

The movie cuts to Agent Kujan interrogating Verbal on the status of criminal Dean Keaton, who was involved in the boat fire. Kujan wants to make sure Keaton is dead, and insists that Verbal tell his story, despite the fact that Verbal has already made his statements and been granted immunity.

Verbal's story begins with five crooks, who are brought together in a police line-up on trumped-up charges. They are an eclectic bunch: Keaton (Byrne) appears to have gone legit; McManus (Baldwin) and Hockney (Pollak) form an instant rivalry; Verbal himself is crippled and walks with a limp; and Fenster (Del Toro) talks in such mangled English that, according to DVD bonus material, even the actors themselves had trouble understanding him. One thing is certain: since all of them are guilty of something, they're probably innocent of what they're actually being accused of (hijacking a truck full of gun parts).

While in jail, the five suspects join forces to plan an emerald heist (as well as a flipping-off of the NYPD), and though Keaton had planned to stay away from further "work", he finds himself continually involved in the group's criminal activities. Using Verbal's plan, the heist goes down with no deaths involved, and eventually they wind up in California, where they are blackmailed by a lawyer named Kobayashi (Postlethwaite) into doing a job for someone named Keyser Söze. (Simultaneously to the flashback narrative, an FBI agent receives an eye-witness account of events on the ship - a badly-burned survivor shouts Söze's name over and over and is eventually coaxed into giving a visual description.) Keaton, Fenster, McManus and Hockney react to Söze's name with a desperation bordering on terror; for his part, Verbal simply wants to know who the man is.

Keyser Söze, as Verbal relates it, is organized crime's version of the monster under the bed. When he was a small-time Turkish dope runner, a rival Hungarian gang tried to seize his territory and business by taking his family hostage. Söze, in response, killed his own family and all (but one) of the threatening gangsters. He then started a crusade against the gang, systematically eliminating their friends, family, children, lovers, parents, and even their homes and businesses before eventually disappearing. He is a criminal mastermind, and his name strikes fear into the heart of hardened criminals. Is he real? Nobody knows. "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."

Back in the narrative, Fenster loses his nerve and bolts; several hours later Kobayashi tells the remaining four how to find his body. After further application of threat, the remaining suspects agree to take on the heist: on a ship docked at San Pedro (the ship from the beginning), two gangs are meeting to finalize the sale of, and then exchange $91 million in cocaine. The suspects are to prevent this from happening, as the sale would be unfortunate for Söze's business. If the suspects wait for the deal to be sealed, they may help themselves to any cash they might stumble upon, but this will require fighting through nearly twice the number of bodyguards.

Spacey as "Verbal" in The Usual Suspects

Regardless, they opt for this strategy - if they are going to risk their lives, they at least want a payoff. Keaton tells Verbal to stay back and make a run for it if things go wrong, which they do; Keyser Söze himself appears and puts an end to all of the remaining suspects, save Verbal himself. Simultaneous to the narrative, the FBI agent discovers, among the dead from the ship, a man from Söze's organization who was about to hand Söze over to the law. This man has been shot twice in the head, which is Söze's calling card. Furthermore, it is discovered that there were, in fact, no drugs on the ship. Kujan believes that the whole point of the exercise was not to interrupt a dope transaction, but rather for Söze to kill the man who was going to rat him out.

Kujan returns Verbal to the crucial point: is Keaton dead? Verbal is sure: he saw Söze trigger the two head shots (which the audience recognizes from the beginning of the movie). But what was Söze actually shooting at? It is Kujan's belief that Keaton is actually Söze (Keaton had successfully faked his own death two years earlier, to say nothing of Söze's activities), which raises the odd question: why is Verbal, then, even alive? Why did Keaton actually tell him to get lost, if his whole objective was to kill anyone who might turn Keaton/Söze over to the police? Kujan is convinced it's because Keaton wanted Verbal to tell the police the story of how he died, and that Verbal was the only one who wasn't smart enough to figure it all out. Verbal breaks down into tears and admits that the whole plan, from the beginning, was Keaton's idea, even the emerald heist Verbal had previously taken credit for. By this time, Verbal's bail has been posted, and he departs with his legal immunity, deciding to take his chances on the street rather than trust the dubious safety of the Witness Protection Program.

Verbal receives his personal effects from the jail warden: a gold watch, a gold cigarette lighter, and a pack of cigarettes. Kujan, relaxing in the office he used for the interrogation, suddenly starts to notice details from Verbal's story appearing on objects around the room; most notably, the cups from which they both have been drinking coffee are made by a company called Kobayashi. He scrambles outside, just missing a fax with the artist's impressions of Keyser Söze's face (which bears more than a passing resemblance to the now released Verbal Kint). As Verbal leaves the jail, his limp suddenly disappears. He steps into a waiting Jaguar limo driven by "Mr. Kobayashi" and departs just as Kujan arrives, desperately searching for "the cripple", a man who no longer exists - "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist; and then like that, he's gone". The credits roll.

Plot twists

The Usual Suspects includes some major plot twists. Throughout the course of the movie, the plot leads viewers to suspect that Söze is Keaton, with the actual answer hitting hard at the end. The film's idea, according to the extras on the DVD release, was to confuse the audience until the very end, when it finally reveals that Verbal is, in fact, Keyser Söze.

Unanswered questions

The movie ends with more questions raised than answered. Who exactly is Keyser Söze? And, perhaps more importantly, who is Verbal Kint? Are they one and the same? Unwinding this tangle is difficult, because Kint himself is the source of almost all the information in the movie; he is clearly an unreliable narrator, raising the possibility that everything the audience has just seen and been told is a lie. Even that, however, is not incriminating; Verbal Kint is clearly a consummate liar, but that does not mean he's necessarily anyone other than Verbal Kint. Of course, when Kujan hears that the burn victim is repeatedly saying Söze's name and asks Kint who this is, Kint's immediate reaction is anger, suggesting his annoyance at having to make up yet another story on the spot.

Director Bryan Singer confesses that he is pretty sure Kint is Söze; writer Christopher McQuarrie has said that it is however the viewer decides to interpret it. The gold cigarette lighter Kint retrieves at the end of the movie is prominently featured in the opening scene; the two smoke their cigarettes the same way. Despite this, Gabriel Byrne (Keaton) was pretty sure his character was Söze, at least until he saw the finished movie. However, in the end, the focus isn't on what really happened, but how Verbal/Keyser was able to manipulate Kujan into thinking he'd won long enough for his bail to be posted.

The DVD commentary reveals several interesting moments in the making of the film. During Söze's appearance on the ship, the camera pans across a pile of dock gear as Kint hobbles behind it, but Spacey stops just short and the camera keeps panning. He also had Byrne dress up as Söze for a specific flashback shot, and filmed him firing Söze's signature dual gunshots... despite Byrne's protests that he was shooting his own character. Finally, Singer points out that "söze", in the Turkish dictionary from which he and writer Christopher McQuarrie took the word, is defined as garrulous or talkative. This, combined with the Turkish transliteration of the German Kaiser, leaves us with a verbal king. This meaning suggests that he is a master of words and speechcraft (not to mention that "verbal king" is one letter off from Spacey's character). But that is not to say that Keyser Söze himself is not above creating fiction to perpetuate his own myth and cover his tracks.

See also

*Twist ending

Trivia of interest

* The title is a reference to the film Casablanca. On multiple occasions in that movie, when confronted with a crime he does not really want to solve, Captain Renault orders his men to "round up the usual suspects." In The Usual Suspects, such an undiscriminating dragnet is exactly the kind of operation that resulted in the five main characters meeting in a police line-up.
* Benicio del Toro's delivery of the line "He'll flip ya'. Flip ya' for real." comes straight from the movie Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1989) about jazz pianist Thelonious Monk. Monk says the line himself.
* The character of Söze is based on murderer John List.
* The manila envelopes containing the characters' personal biographies are handed out in the order the characters die.
* The lineup part was originally written to be a serious scene but the actors had been messing about and laughing so much that Singer actually put the funniest version in. (see Breaking character)
* According to the DVD commentary, the stolen emeralds are real gemstones on loan for the movie.
* K.S. are the initials of both Keyser Söze, and Kevin Spacey, the actor who played Verbal Kint.
* Punk band Link 80 have a song called "Verbal Kint" on their 17 Reasons album.
* The line "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist" may come from a prose poem in the collection Le Spleen de Paris written by Charles Baudelaire: "Mes chers frères, n'oubliez jamais, quand vous entendrez vanter le progrès des lumières, que la plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas!"[1].
* In the computer game Warcraft 3, typing in 'keyserSöze' will give the player 500 gold.
* Over a decade later, Kevin Spacey and Bryan Singer would reunite to work on the film Superman Returns, in which Singer cast Spacey as the diabolical supervillain Lex Luthor.
* The name of the character Kobayashi, who forces the main characters into a no-win situation, is a reference to the Kobayashi Maru no-win training scenario in the Star Trek films.

Cultural references

*In 2004, Marvel Comics released "Identity Disc", a mini-series in which six villains (Deadpool, Vulture, Sandman, Sabretooth, Bullseye and Juggernaut) are forced to work together on behalf of a master criminal. Fans decried the book as a complete rip-off of "The Usual Suspects", complete with the fact that Vulture, having told Nick Fury the entire story, is revealed to have been the mastermind behind the scheme.
*In an episode of the sitcom Yes, Dear, the two married couples go to counseling to resolve issues. The main character tells a story of "why he needs to have control" which is later proved by the doctor to be a fraud. As he walks out of the counselors office, the camera focuses in on his foot, which changes from a limp to a regular step, and he is shown to be grinning.
*In the 31st season finale episode of Saturday Night Live, Andy Samberg explains to guest host Kevin Spacey why he was late for the show. Spacey then discovers that the story was a lie, from items around the room, and through a fax from Samberg with a police-style sketch his face and the caption "I Lied!".
*During the ending of Scary Movie, Cindy Campbell sits in the police station trying to make sense of everything, finally realising that the killer is mentally handicapped Doofy Gilmore. He is seen walking away and proceeds to shed his outfit and fake mustache, revealing himself not only not handicapped, but actually to be a 'cool' guy who jumps into reporter Gail Hailstorm's car. The two drive off, with the throwing the fright mask out as the final piece of evidence. Having arrived too late to capture him, Cindy stands in the middle of the street, helpless (though, unlike Kujan, she is run over seconds later).
*The Usual Suspects inspired Jay-Z's video "The city is mine."
*Serves as the inspiration of the video of the Common song, "Testify." In the video, a man is on trial for drug-dealing and his wife pleas his innocence. At the end, after he has been convicted and herself cleared, she changes her demeanor, strolling out of the courthouse, smoking a cigarette as a car approaches to pick her up. Then the detective who nabbed her husband runs out of the building and stands, baffled, in the street. Identical to the last few seconds of the movie.

External links

*The script
*"The tale of Keyser Söze"