Doesn't quite pull off the trick ending

Rating: 7/10 (13 January 2007)

The Usual Suspects is a great caper movie; stylish, exciting, intelligent and all that. The problem I had with it was that it's too easy to guess the ending. By the final scenes, the upshot is that the only mystery is Keyser Soze's true identity. Then you've really only got one character out of the main four that fits. It's too obvious for it to be Keaton; the other two aren't fleshed out enough for it to matter; Kint it has to be, the only mystery is how they explain it. So the final revelation is an anticlimax. The scene where the cop pieces together Kint's lie from the chaotic evidence in the office is great, but just to have Kevin Spacey walk off with no further twist is a letdown. Maybe if it had been Fenster back from the dead, or one of the cops, or even Pete 'Nice Try at Japanese Accent but It Goes Scottish Occasionally' Postlethwaite, who might shoot Spacey from the car, or maybe even the girlfriend - and this movie is very light on females - there would have been a final extra twist to make this movie more than just good. As it is, you think this super-duper master criminal seems to have made things extremely difficult for himself for no reason. Too much like 'and it was all a dream, The End'.