People actually like this?!

Rating: 1/10 (16 February 2009)

I almost feel sorry for anybody who likes this pretentious crap.
Mostly everyone who does like it only likes it for one reason...the big twist at the end. But anybody with half a brain that is at least partially functioning can see through the transparent and poorly-written script and predict the ending by the half-hour mark.
Spoilers ahead. Do yourself a favor and read them rather than wasting your time watching this mess of a film.
OK, the basic plot...cripple is being questioned by a police officer at the police station. The cripple tells the cop about past events that supposedly happened. The stories the cripple tells all seem to contradict one another, and the cop is getting very annoyed since he can't seem to find out the real identity of the man behind the previous events...a man named Keyser Sose.
But who is Keyser Sose? I'll tell you who just by explaining what any intelligent movie viewer would have been thinking the entire time, and that is this. Keyser Sose can only be one person, and that person is Verbal Kint. And the reason why he has to be Keyser Sose is because he is the only person that is involved in the story from start to finish. Nobody else is in the office but Verbal and the cop, and we know the cop didn't do it (although that would have been an actual good twist), so it must be Verbal. Can't be any of the other "suspects" because, what if it was? Then the story would move somewhere else and Verbal would no longer be involved.
Which brings me to another major flaw...why the hell is Verbal even there in the first place? Him going to the police station serves no purpose at all.
And as I patiently waited for the extremely transparent conclusion to be revealed as exactly what I predicted the whole time, I thought of one thing...Verbal is a cripple, so he can't possibly be Keyser Sose. But that was nothing more than a cheap red-herring used only to intentionally throw the viewer off in a different direction. Didn't work very well at all.
Why else is this movie total crap? The directing is cheap and thoughtless, acting is decent at best but even that's stretching it, cinematography looks ugly as hell, and I didn't care about any character in the whole movie at all. Didn't give a hell if anybody lived or died. All that paired with the fact that the entire movie was built around the idea of a surprise ending with no substance of itself makes this a piece of garbage.
Wait, I'm sorry. Comparing this movie to garbage would be insulting to things I throw away.