A Rip-Off

Rating: Null/10 (15 September 2003)

The ending of this film has been touted as great by many. I assert however that it breaks a sacred-and-implicit trust between the filmmaker and the audience. An explanation follows, if you already enjoy the movie and don't want to change your opinion, go ahead and skip the rest of this review.
Of course, SPOILERS follow.
The main character (arguably), Kint (Spacey), weaves an elaborate and deceptive tale. That's fine. What occurs visually, however, is repugnant if you think about it.
A visual is forced upon the audience. Certainly this is necessary in movies, and also it is quite common for a verbal or written description of a character to not match the actor/actress/animal portraying that character. In this case however it is something altogether different.
The imagination of a character inside of the movie, is portrayed as fact to the audience. Never once in the film is it indicated, through dialogue or visually (using standard 'camera tricks' for example) that it was imagination. Each audience member has to either accept the premise that it was a 'fact', or spend every moment of the movie reminding oneself that it was merely another character's guess. No movie should require that much energy from its audience. This wasn't hiding crucial information from the audience, as in Hitchcock films. This was pushing a falsehood onto the viewer.
Furthermore, there is more than one detective questioning him at the time. Which one is actually visualizing what Kint is describing? Certainly two or more individuals would have their own unique interpretation of the description. How do we know that we, the audience, would imagine the same thing? And yet the identical person reemerges in the 'flashback' scenes every time Kint's story continues.
If the wife of the Crowe (Bruce Willis) character in Sixth Sense were to enter the restaurant in the anniversary scene, then we (through the camera) were to step into her point-of-view, and actually see Crowe across the table in the chair, but then at the end of the movie discover he was actually not visible, we would feel "ripped off", would we not?
The Usual Suspects commits the same sort of transgression to the audience. Until someone attached to this project can convince me that all of the officers questioning Kint somehow had a shared 'psychic' experience, and imagined exactly and precisely the same person, continually, down to the last long strand of hair, for several hours, I stand by my claim that this was a rip-off.