Fine for the genre

Rating: Null/10 (21 January 2003)

I guess my one-line summary is "damning with faint praise," as the saying goes.... But I really do want to praise this movie. It's one of the best films I'm seen in a while; smartly written, beautifully directed and shot. The acting is great. I have to say that, while not as stunning as, say, the ending to The 39 Steps, the surprise ending to Suspects is cool enough.
I am a little surprised at how high Suspects is on the IMDb top 250. But, in defense of those who would gladly see it ensconced there, I will add that "heroic crook"-type movies tend to put me off. It's very hard to humanize a crook in the movies as far as I'm concerned. I see that Suspects holds these guys at a sort of arms length by highlighting an ultimate dog-eat-dog lack of honor among thieves, at the highest level. So that salvages it a bit for me. But, for example, Suspects doesn't come near the humanization of criminality that The Godfather does. I saw that the movie Heat tried to cop some of that same prestige (by showing the crooks having happy family dinners, etc.), but for me failed achieve an integration. I'm telling you; you'll always have a hard time convincing me to let criminal elements on screen into the tabernacle of my heart! Godfather does this, and a look at how it succeeds could be instructive. Suspects only succeeds to the extent that it doesn't make a pretense of getting you under the skins of the malefactors in that typical time-honored cinematic manner.
I would recommend this movie as cinematic art. I cannot recommend it as a movie that succeeds on a visceral level. Which means I can only recommend it in a narrow sense. Sorry.