Who IS Keyser Söze? Who freakin' cares?

Rating: 4/10 (29 November 2016)

Released in 1995 and directed by Bryan Singer, "The Usual Suspects" is a crime drama/mystery about five thugs who decide to team up and get revenge on the police (Keven Spacey, Gabriel Byrne, Steve Baldwin, Keven Pollak and Benicio Del Toro). After their successful operation, the five are manipulated by the legendary criminal Keyser Söze into taking a much riskier gig. One is captured and he's interrogated by the police (Chazz Palminteri & Giancarlo Esposito). The big question is: Who IS Keyser Söze? Pete Postlethwaite is on hand as Söze's right-hand man while Suzy Amis plays the babe of one of the thugs.
This is a "twist ending" flick and, honestly, the film is too reliant on it. The whole movie is just "wait for the twist," it isn't actually that entertaining to sit through. In fact, most of the dialog is pretty boring; and only had some value in the end. Moreover, the main characters are just foul-mouthed, tough-guy low-lifes, although Spacey's character is somewhat interesting. As such, it's next to impossible to care about them. Let 'em all kill each other for all I care. Yes, the ending is clever in some ways, but everything that goes on up to that point isn't really worth enduring. As far as the twist goes, I was able to pinpoint the identity of the mystery man down to two people; and I was right. But there are some interesting details to the twist that I doubt anyone could figure out without first knowing the ending and then re-watching the flick. But, after watching, I'm not interested in seeing it again. The story and the characters aren't worth it. The film didn't make me care enough to watch again.
Filmmakers must understand that, for a movie to be enduring, it has to be about the journey not the destination. And, for me, the convoluted journey in "The Usual Suspects" is just dull and laborious. If the characters were worthy and I cared about them I might be more interested, but that's not the case. Then there's something that I experienced a couple of times while observing the five main guys babble back and forth: I had the overwhelming sense that these were just actors playing 'hip' tough-tawkin' hooligans rather than the characters they were supposed to be. This is never a good sign.
I can't believe the high rating this movie has on IMDb; the movie's seriously overrated.
The film runs 106 minutes and was shot in the Los Angeles area and New York City.
GRADE: C-
***SPOILER ALERT***
I want to emphasize that this review does not criticize the film based on pretending to "know the twist all along" (as stated above, I was able to figure out who the mystery man likely was, but not the other details). The problem is that the entire movie is based around listening to a guy make up a bunch of stuff. Gee, so all we really know is there was a ship that got torched and Kevin Spacey's character doesn't really have a limp. Okay, thanks for wasting my time with everything else. Great storytelling (rolling my eyes).