How come nobody's mentioned the Usual Suspects?

Rating: 7/10 (28 November 1999)

It just surprised me a bit. The past few years have seen a whole bundle of 'twist' movies (Wild Things, Dead Man's Curve etc) where the final reel reveals new insights into the previous ones, but although none of them are bad movies as such, they've all seemed a bit too self-conscious - twists for the sake of it, rather than in order to genuinely stun the audience. Because you know that nothing is what it seems, you spend the movie trying to guess what the twist will be. The biggest effect it can have on you, therefore, is to mildly surprise you with the way things turned out. The success of the Sixth Sense is, like the Usual Suspects, that it only turns out to have a twist right at the very end. Most people I know who saw the Usual Suspects went to see a heist movie, and thought they'd got one right until the fateful pin-up-board-coffee-cup moment. Similarly, with the Sixth Sense, you get an effective and straightforward spooky movie which suddenly catches you by surprise. The movie has done such an effective job at this that I think it has been somewhat overrated.
First of all, I admit that I knew that a twist of some sort was coming (knowing that, it became quite predictable), which, by what I've said already, means that my appreciation for the movie was dulled because it couldn't completely surprise me. The flipside is that I wasn't so awed by the twist as to be blinded by the movie's faults. It's definitely a good film - maybe an '8', and the acting is superb (especially in the mother-son scene in the car), but it's nowhere near one of the all-time top 100 movies, let alone top 10. Two main points:
1. Once you remove the shock-effect of the twist, it's actually a very meagre tale. As many others have pointed out, the actual resolution of the boy's problem is given far too little weight -the film is unbalanced. Far too much of it is taken up by Bruce finding out what anybody who's seen the trailor already knows, and far too little actually deals with it.
2. If you argue that the twist cannot be removed from the story as a whole - that it is simply too central, then the film must be judged on how well it is integrated into what goes before. The brilliance of the Usual Suspects is that the twist and counter-twists of the ending both explain the previous events better than the previous narrative had. It all makes so much more sense. Although the Sixth Sense is pretty tight (the first encounter between Bruce and the boy makes more sense at the end, for example), there are nonetheless big gaps, like what happened in the time between the opening Donny Wahlberg bit and the "The Next Fall" new scene (sorry, I'm trying really hard not to give away any spoilers). I have bigger objections still, but I don't want to give it all away (a cop-out, I admit).
There are loads of good points about the Sixth Sense (the acting and the elegant direction spring most immediately to mind) which elevate it to the status of a damn good movie, but if you remove the once-only shock of the twist, what you're left with is not enough to make it a classic.