Clever and well-executed, but not really gripping

Rating: 7/10 (5 October 1999)

THE USUAL SUSPECTS begins with a shadowy figure murdering a man named Keaton, whom we do not know yet. The mysterious person then sets a wharf and ship on fire. Dozens of people are killed. While one police team tries to get information out of a badly burned survivor who cannot speak English, Detective Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) interviews the only other survivor, a shy, crippled nebbish called Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey). The rest of the story is told by Verbal in flashback as Kujan interrogates him.

Verbal starts the tale six months ago, when a truck is hijacked, and the police round up five hardened criminals, the usual suspects, to place in a lineup. Verbal runs scams; McManus and Hockney (Stephen Baldwin and Kevin Pollak) are a team of armed robbers and safecrackers; I'm not sure what Fenster (Benicio del Toro) does, since his accent is so hard to understand; and Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne) is a crooked cop trying to go straight. None of them gets arrested for the hijacking, but McManus proposes a team robbery while they are together, and thus an impromptu criminal team comes together.
Both Verbal and the Hungarian survivor think that the mysterious figure of Keyser Soze, a legendary criminal, is manipulating the five men behind the scenes, especially when Verbal tells how an emissary of Keyser Soze (Pete Postlethwaite) approaches the team and coerces them into doing a job for him. Soze is never expressly identified on screen, leading both the audience and the characters to wonder whether he really exists, and if he does, if he might not be one of the characters we've already met.
THE USUAL SUSPECTS gets most of its mileage out of the device of Keyser Soze; not knowing who he is lends a lot of suspense to the sordid goings-on. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT became a huge success for only one reason; the production team remembered that the unseen and imagined is more terrifying than anything that can be shown on screen. THE USUAL SUSPECTS takes advantage of this same principle.
The movie's ending is its raison d'etre; even if you have guessed the identity of Keyser Soze, you will be some distance short of anticipating all the last-minute twists that the script visits upon you. It does leave you picking back over the movie trying to sort reality from illusion for some time thereafter.
Unfortunately, THE USUAL SUSPECTS isn't a really superb thriller, because the team of Verbal, Fenster, Keaton, McManus and Hockney just doesn't contain a single sympathetic character, or even a particularly well-drawn one. The audience doesn't have much emotion invested in what happens to them, or whether one or any of them is the mysterious Keyser Soze. Intellectually, the film is pleasing, but abstract; there's nothing at stake that really matters to the viewer.
In the acting department, everybody is good, and Spacey and Baldwin are excellent. Director Bryan Singer sets a steady pace, not as fierce as a De Palma, never mind a Hitchcock, could have produced, but without ever really being boring. John Ottman's music is exceptional and Singer applies it to the scenes very well.
A thriller movie that makes the viewers think is a rare exception to the rule, and so THE USUAL SUSPECTS is enjoyable. Could we please have one that makes us feel, too?
Rating: *** out of ****.