One ofthe most intelligent crime-thrillers ever!

Rating: 10/10 (15 June 2003)

One of the my personal best as far as absolute favorites. The events leading up to a fateful night at a Los Angeles harbor are traced from the viewpoint of a crippled con artist from Queens. You never know how much of what is said is genuine, since the narrator is of limited intelligence and naive in comparisson to his former partners.
After securing immunity by the D.A., "Verbal" Kint is coerced into telling a New York-based Customs agent David Kujan about what happened between the line-up six weeks earlier, where he met his compatriots, and the night that a boat allegedly carrying narcotics was destroyed. Kujan has played somewhat of a Javert to one of Verbal's associates, Dean Keaton, an ex-cop from New York who was trying to go straight after a career as a hijacker, and settle down with his lovely attorney girlfriend--or so Verbal paints him to be. The other three, McManus, Fenster, and Todd Hockney, create an array of decidedly different people. Keaton, always the reluctant partisipant, spars often with McManus, a psychotic given to fits of violent rage, vying for the role of leader of the gang. Fenster, McManus' partner from before, is a mild-mannered Latino who tries to stay out of the way of things. Hockney is a mechanic and explosives expert who doesn't care about anyone but himself, but tensions flare between him and McManus as well. Verbal is sort of the odd man out: crippled so that he is limited in physicality, and inexperienced in the art of hijacking.
After pulling off a successful job in New York, the five men travel to LA to meet McManus and Fenster's fence, Redfoot. After a job goes bad they are conronted with a mysterious attorney working for a legendary gangster named Keyser Soze. The attorney, Kobayashi, charges them with one final job.
The story, as presented by Verbal Kint, presents one final question: Who is Keyser Soze. Keaton doesn't believe in him. Kujan believes Keaton IS him. And it ends with a twist that you may never see coming (unless you read between the lines of the reviews posted).
Gabriel Byrne plays the reluctant Irish cop with conviction. Kevin Spacey's Oscar-winning (and star-making) Verbal Kint seems the most mild and simple of people. Chazz Palminteri's David Kujan is perfect to counter the image Verbal describes of Keaton. Smaller supporting roles by Pete Postlethwaite, as Kobayashi, Dan Hedaya, as a restless LA cop, Giancarlo Esposito as an FBI agent friend of Kujan's, and Benicio Del Toro's sly Fenster (five years before he won the Oscar for "Traffic"), help to give fully-fleshed characters to Christopher McQuarrie's already-rich storytelling, and Bryan Singer's ("X-Men," "X2") career-making direction.