Second-least-worthwhile really popular movie

Rating: 4/10 (6 June 2006)

When you watch "The Sixth Sense" for the second or third time, its clues and secrets are in plain sight and you feel at once foolish and delighted at the movie's ingenuity. When you watch "The Usual Suspects" again, the clues are not laid out before your eyes; they are withheld until the very end. The final twist is not a re-evaluation of everything that has gone before, even though it may feel like it; it's the revelation that most of what came before was made-up. "The Usual Suspects" cheats.
Convinced I was mistaken about this most popular of modern-noir detective thrillers, I revisited it and concentrated on the character I knew bore the most watching. What I found was unabashed narrative manipulation. This is a slick, involving movie that sucks the viewer in with menace and intrigue, but in the end we find that most of its content has been totally made up. Instead of going back over things to track down the clues to what we know at the end, we have to throw up our hands and admire Keyser Soze's ingenuity while accepting that we will never know the real story.
I was on board for most of my second viewing because it seemed at first like the only things that Verbal Kint was truly making up were his little asidesthe barbershop quartet in Skokie, Illinois; picking beans in Guatemala, etc.but no, it turns out the pivotal characters Redfoot and Kobayashi were also, apparently, invented. Or maybe he just made up false names for them, since we do see the Kobayashi character at the movie's end. The point is that we don't know. We can't tell who's real and who's not, and since everyone plays a pivotal role in the alleged plot, we can't tell what actually happened and what didn't. This is not exciting storytelling; this is trickery, and a waste of two hours. If I'm going to rack my brain trying to figure out a movie while it's unfolding, I at least want to be able to kick myself that I didn't figure it out earlier, since the clues were all there.
Gabriel Byrne (who plays Dean Keaton, the guy who detective Kujan thinks is Keyser Soze) was convinced while shooting the movie that he was Keyser Soze. Why? Because the movie we see is a story invented by the real Keyser Soze precisely to make detective Kujan think Keaton is Soze. This is the penultimate conclusion that we are given just before the real revelation, and, according to everything we have seen, it makes perfect sense. Based on the story we have been shown, Byrne's is the only logical conclusion. To find out that we were all duped by Keyser Sozedetective Kujan and Gabriel Byrne and all of us in the audience too opens up a small meta-cinematic can of worms, but mostly it's just frustrating. The filmmakers have tricked us into emotionally committing to a story that wasn't there in the first place.
This is of course what we do in every movie we've ever been to, but rarely does a film itself expose us for the dupes we are when we go to see it. Maybe as far as the real world is concerned, the real menace of Keyser Soze is that he won't even let us enjoy a movie on its own terms. He pulls the rug out from under us for his own benefit, and somehow we are all beguiled into thinking that's a cool feat, when really it just means we've all been suckered.