Average at best

Rating: Null/10 (1 May 2001)

WARNING: SPOILERS
I missed "The Usual Suspects" when it came out in the theaters, but since a friend saw it before I did and kept telling me how good it was, I decided that I really had to see it.
Believe me, I wanted to really like this movie, to see the genius that some people saw in it. And I am a fan of plot twists. I enjoyed the ones in the Sixth Sense, Fight Club, Memento, or the less bewildering ones in The Godfather, What Ever Happened To Baby Jane or Citizen Kane so this movie, with his highly praised final twist, should have been - if not the ultimate movie experience - at least a very satisfying one. That said, I found this movie mediocre and painfully overrated. And I'm sorry, but that plot twist just doesn't work. It's manipulative and inconsistent with the whole movie, for a simple reason: the whole movie is presented as facts, not as a narrated story.
Where other movies can pull off twists because of their nature - that is, because it's clear that we are seeing a story through a narrator's eyes - "The Usual Suspects" uses a manipulative gimmick that, sadly, is mistaken by many as good narration. The movie never explains whose eyes we are seeing the story through, because... well just because. There's no explanation, apart from that explaining it would demolish the plot. So who is actually seeing the story like that? Verbal Kint? Hardly: if it was him, we would know it's mostly a bogus story. Apparently the only person that could possibly see the story that way is Dave Kujan, the cop in the office, who believes almost every single word that Verbal speaks. And that would be rather insulting to the intelligence of the viewer, because there's no reason why we should be watching the cop's visual interpretation of the story rather than our own. More, there's almost no voice-over that would remind the viewer that he's seeing a narration, and it's very questionable that a person that didn't take part in the narrated story would envision it like that (think about it, do you really have a clear image when somebody narrates his own story)?
One of the previous comments by a users said "shocking and surprising - if you're an idiot" and that's pretty much what I thought too. The movie relies almost only on a twist that might appeal the casual movie-goers, but that's completely illogical at a further examination.
"The Usual Suspects" was for me a huge disappointment, and repeated views just confirmed this point.