entertaining, but with a lame twist

Rating: Null/10 (10 February 2002)

CONTAINS SPOILER Twist endings are gimmicks, pure and simple. More often than not, they are cheap attempts to add punch to a climax that would be utterly forgettable otherwise. In the best cases, they force you to reevaluate the experience you thought you were having up to that point. (SPOILER ALERT!) The usual Suspects works as a fast paced, well acted heist film, with some genuine moments of suspense and excitement. The twist at the end, though, is nothing more than a negation of everything that came before, the equivalent of the hoary old "It was just a dream!" cliche. All the ending tells us is that everything we have seen is a lie- of course it is, since this is fiction! Unlike a good Agatha Christie story (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd being the most clever, IMHO), or even
The Sixth Sense (whose twist I figured out based on nothing but the preview, but which I still thought was effective) the ending does not inform the previous piece of entertainment, it robs it of value by telling you that there was nothing of substance there to begin with.
Memento, whose twists (most of them) are logical, integrated, and sensible, is a far better film.