Great; could have been greater.

Rating: 9/10 (20 February 2001)

This movie should have been titled "Keyser Soze." Like eponymous prop in "The Maltese Falcon", Soze isn't even mentioned until halfway through the movie but he comes to dominate everything and everyone. Instead, we start off with the five title characters but soon it's not their story. It's almost as if it were the start of one move and the last half (but not the end) of another.
The movie never lets up in building tension and new twists. Events pile up on top of one another until every one is caught up in Soze's net. You can almost see writer Christopher McQuarrie bahing on the keys and then stopping & asking himself, "and THEN what?!"
Still, I have to wonder about that line "The gretest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." It's great but it sticks out like a sore thumb. If that's supposed to be a film-noir throwback (the great era for lines) then the rest of the dialogue should have supported it, or a wise-crack like in the film-noir era or it should have been the unspoken subtext.
Whatever your opinion on that line or the twist ending, you can't deny that McQuarrie earned his Oscar nor Spacey his.