Usual Suckspects

Rating: 1/10 (22 February 2007)

A crime thriller that isn't about redemption or revenge or much anything at all, "Suspects" isn't a movie as much as a display of a director's obsessive lust for the criminal underworld. Director Bryan Singer likes rain soaked gutters, burning cigarettes, crooked cops, clever retorts, smoky pool halls and menacing tough guys. Characters don't populate this movie. Attitude does. The movie isn't interested in where these guys came from, what motivates them, what their struggles are. Without struggle, there's no tension; without tension, there's no suspense; and a crime thriller without suspense exists only to covet the unpleasant, the nasty.
With a quick pace, flamboyant cinematography, and lines like, "brought in on trumped up charges to be leaned on by half-wits", the movie insists that it's crafty and clever, but fails with characters who can't come alive beyond brief sketches. Hockney is a surly slob; Fenster dresses in sharp suits and mumbles; McManus is wild and temperamental; Keaton is grumpy; Kint is soft-spoken and club-footed. As dialogue exists here only to move characters from one place to the next, it could really be assigned to anyone. Similar lines like "I'll f--k your father in the shower", "I did it to your mother's a-s", and "At least I don't have a captain with his d--k in my a-s all day long", uttered by three separate characters, generate the impression that a single trash talking lowlife is inhabiting five people.
The events of the plot have no significance either. The team robs a group of crooked cops in New York, then travels to Los Angeles to pull off another job for a guy called Redfoot, and are finally enlisted by Soze's assistant Kobayashi to steal cocaine. Kint's account of the first two jobs takes about an hour of film time. It'd be of no consequence if it were left out. The heists are redundant and advance the characters in no way at all: Keaton is still grumpy, Hockney is still surly, they all still call each other "cocksucker." The first hour exists only for the stimulation of watching thugs wave guns and beat people up. The film's sense of aprogress, of stalled, redundant cycles, inhabits the interrogation between Kujan and Kint. The characters never progress beyond a pattern of friendliness, petulance, aggression, a big blow-up, threats, ceasefire and then all over again.
Verbal's account is presented as objective. He has no reason to lie, so we wouldn't expect him to. However, the film lets us know a minute before it's over that everything we have seen is made up. Apparently, Verbal, using things in the interrogation room for material, mostly the bulletin board behind Kujan, tricked the cop and the film's audience. A post-it note about a guy named Redfoot becomes the character Redfoot, a mug by "Kobayashi" becomes Soze's assistant Kobayashi, and so on. Realizing that a supposedly objective narrator has misled us, we re-evaluate everything that has come before. What really happened? How does the lie illuminate the rest of the story? Singer supplies no answers. Kint walks out of Kujan's office, ending the film.
One could say that the filmmakers have done this deliberately, that the absence of character, distinct truth, and connection between events is deliberate. That Singer is a nihilist and this is his view of the world. A viable worldview, fine, but his film can't escape being an antagonistic prank on its audience. Singer uses familiar storytelling tools and setups to snare us and as the story develops, he entices our imaginations with more and more clues to figure out the puzzle. We're intrigued because he's telling us there's an answer, that all this is going somewhere, that every scene and every line is a piece to the puzzle. He dares us to pay attention so maybe we can figure it out before the film does. Riddles do the same thing. For instance, the answer to the riddle, "I'm trying to go home but I can't because the man in the mask; who is the man in the mask?," is "the Catcher." When we find that out, we take pleasure in knowing that the answer was there, all we had to do was think and see the obvious from a different perspective.
"Suspects" disappoints because the answer was never there for us to see. Customs agent Kujan only notices the material on the bulletin board when he leans up close to it. Whenever the camera lingers with Kint, nothing on the board can be seen distinctly. More important, the film never cues us that Kint might be making it all up. His total immunity from prosecution gives him no reason to waste Kujan's and our time for the entire length of a movie. What Singer ends up doing is cannibalizing the very genre of storytelling he admires. He mocks the thrill of expectation used to tantalize us, only to say that there is no puzzle. Singer's answer to the riddle about the Catcher is the illogic of "there is no man." Much like Verbal Kint's lies, Singer's charade can only be taken as the snub that it is.