Testosterone thriller cleverly done

Rating: 8/10 (1 February 2007)

The title might suggest a comedic takeoff on a crime thriller employing some sophisticated shtick or maybe we're in for something like Danny DeVito in "Throw Mama from the Train." But this is not a comedy. It is not exactly your usual crime thriller either. It is an unconscious parody of crime thrillers with some curious depth replete with corrupt cops, shadowy off screen sinister villains and pathetic low lifes.
Although I don't think director Bryan Singer and his high school pal and collaborator, scriptwriter Christopher McQuarrie, had the slightest intention toward burlesque, I was again and again struck by an unconscious underlying tone of parody. The title is the tip off.
"Round up the usual suspects" is a line from Casablanca (1942), as most movie buffs know. Claude Rains, as Captain Renault, head of the police in Casablanca, says "round up the usual suspects" more as an indication of local Moroccan justice than as a real order. It is just the sort of cynically ironic line that would inspire Singer and McQuarrie to dream up this exceedingly cynical, but bordering on the funny, flick.
While Casablanca was a bittersweet love story, "The Usual Suspects" is anything but. The cast is decidedly and deliberately all male with only Suzy Amis in a minor role as Edie Finneran to interfere with the macho lineup of crooks, cops and shady sinister types. The movie features Stephen Baldwin (Mike McManus), Gabriel Bryne (Dean Keaton), Benicio Del Toro (Fred Fenster), Chazz Palminteri (Dave Kujan), Kevin Pollak (Todd Hockney), and stars Kevin Spacey as Verbal Kint. These guys are all excellent actors who together create a kind mass energy that propels the film. In more ways than one I am reminded of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992) and David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) (movie directed by James Foley). Consider these similarities: In both Glengarry and The Usual Suspects you have a virtually all male cast who sling expletives at one another in an "at your throat" style. In both Reservoir Dogs and The Usual Suspects you have five crooks thrown together to do a job, and again everything is exceedingly macho with threats and expletives flying around like water in a hurricane. In all three films the cast is outstanding, with Al Pacino, Jack Lemon, Ed Harris, Alex Baldwin, Kevin Spacey and Alan Arkin leading the cast in Glengarry, and Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Steve Buscemi doing the same in Reservoir Dogs. These guys are not your run of the mill actors. They are the kind of guys that star in kick butt movies. They know how to look and act authentic.
But an even more startling way to compare The Usual Suspects with Glengarry and Reservoir Dogs is in the dialogue. In all three movies the dialogue is preciously wrought with an emphasis on sounding just a little different. In Reservoir Dogs Tarantino sometimes makes the characters sound like they are spouting Shakespeare, and in Glengarry Glen Ross Mamet has them playing verbal hijinks like machine gun chatter in an experimental stage play. Here Singer and McQuarrie (his script won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay) employ a lot of the same rapid fire, seemingly authentic vernacular interspersed with theatrical sounding speech especially in the case of Kobayashi (Pete Postlethwaite) who calmly calls everybody "Mister" like an English butler. And of course Verbal is very verbal and able to spout lines like, "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn't exist." Keep that line in mind as you watch, and ask yourself who plays Keyser Soze, the devil incarnate, so to speak. And pay attention to references to Skokie, Illinois. That will help to unravel the plot. The ending contains a nicely set up surprise.
Currently rated #17 at IMDb, The Usual Suspects is the sort of cult favorite beloved by young males fascinated with testosterone-hyped action, macho-inspired dialogue and devil man care anti-heroics. But it's a little better than that. And clearly this is not a chick flick, and therein lies a problem. While most males will at least find this interesting, many females will just shake their heads at how obvious is the seduction of the targeted audience. Personally I thought the movie was a laugh. I actually laughed out loud at some of the theatrics and grinned with appreciation at how surely Singer had captured the mentality of the targeted audience while bonding with it. But I have to say (for those directors, writers and producers who would like to do half as well), you can't fake it. Tarantino and Singer and others have been able to pull this sort of thing off because they really believe in the psychology. They really believe there are tough guys who say "f-you" even with a gun shoved in their face, and there really are guys who see the world in a kind of cops/robbers, good guy/bad guy, buddy/rat persona world. And there's some truth to it.
Spacey won a supporting actor Oscar playing Verbal Kint, a kind of crippled loser, it would seem. He should have won Best Actor, he was that good and he was the heart of the film and the guy with whom the audience most identified. He is the seeming loser, the little guy, the underdog who turns out to be smarter and tougher than anybody else. I think that is what the targeted audience really loves about this movie.
Bottom line: a must see for anybody interested in the history of the American cinema and in the evolution of the mystery/thriller/noir genre. A few academic dissertations have been and will be written on how the cinematic hero has evolved from, say, Tom Mix to Verbal Kint. You might want to write one yourself.
(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!)