One of the best movies ever...

Rating: 9/10 (22 November 2004)

"The Usual Suspects" is a movie about five criminals who meet in a line-up. Some of them know each other from before and some of them don't, but the one thing they've got in common is that they're excellent thieves in their own fields... The only one who differs form the others is Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne); a former thief, according to himself, who wants to go straight.. However, he is talked into joining the others in what's supposed to be one, single operation.. (By the by, this sounds very familiar seen in the history of American action movies, but this is done in such a manner in this movie that you won't give it a thought.)
Eventually the five criminals start wondering whether the line-up was coincidental, because they get an offer from a person called Keyser Söze - a myth in the criminal underworld - and the entire situation seems just too "organized" to be a coincidence. I won't give away more of the movie if you haven't seen it, so I'll just move along to my personal opinions.
As you might have guessed from the headline, I rather enjoyed this movie. It's got everything a thriller needs; an incredibly good story, great actors who tell the story like it should be told and a killer ending. The actors are brilliant and I love everything from Kevin Spacey's weird walk to Benico Del Toro's attempt to talk German-English (that's actually what he's trying to do, according to himself. His character is named Fenster, which is the German word for window, and hence he decided to give his character a German accent)
But if I have to find something not so good about this movie, it's the fact that there's a Baldwin in it. I'm sick and tired of finding a Baldwin in 9 out of 10 American productions from the 1990s. BUT, the Stephen of the kind is doing a great job as the rather hot-headed McManus, and when that's the only flaw I can think of in this movie, that says a great deal about how good it is.
The ending deserves an entire paragraph of its own. It is probably the only ending I have seen that has managed to change my impression of the rest of the movie. During the couple of minutes this ending lasts, the rest of the movie just gets better and better, and then when you see it again (because you have to watch this movie again right after you've seen it the first time) it's even better because of the ending. It's incredible! I won't bore you anymore now; just go and watch the movie again and be reminded of how brilliant it is!!