Mind Boggling Good

Rating: 10/10 (17 October 2005)

"The Usual Suspects" is one of those examples in which you can't take things at face value.
As the film starts (Which takes place "last night"), we see Keaton (Gabriel Byrne)on a ship, bodies all over the place. He looks up to see that a figure is standing there. He address the figure as "Keyser" before he is shot. The ship explodes, sending a nice fireball. However, there is one survivor: a cripple named Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey)who is telling the story of the events leading to the ship explosion to Agent Kujan (Chazz Palminteri), who has an ax to grind with Keaton.
We then cut to a few weeks before. Keaton, along with McManus (Stephen Baldwin),Fenster (Benicio Del Toro) and Hockney (Kevin Pollak)are taken in for questioning, along with Kint, about a stolen truck. Hot under the collar for the arrests, they decide to get even by exposing a bit of NYPD corruption and get paid in the process. However, it seems that they soon end up in even worse trouble.
It seems that at one time or another, each of the guys have stolen from Keyser Soze, an underworld figure that is just as mean and rotten to the core as the 5 guys (After all, he did kill his family rather than let his enemies get to them). No one knows who he is or what he looks like (He works through buffers, so no one knows anything about who is giving the orders). He is also incredibly feared, and has a job for our 5 anti-heroes: they are to board a ship to steal nearly $100 million in cocaine. Clearly a suicide mission, they have no choice but to follow through, especially when Soze's lawyer Kobayashi (Pete Postlethwaite)explains quite calmly (Even when threatened with death)just how high the stakes really are.
However, it is the final minutes of the film that will have the moviegoer shaking their head and saying "What the HELL?" This is a must see film and it put Bryan Singer (Who has done the XMen films since then)and Kevin Spacey on the map. Dark and full of twists that make a pretzel look straight, "The Usual Suspects" is something to watch on a stormy evening.