Overrated! SPOILERS AHEAD!

Rating: Null/10 (18 August 2011)

I'd heard people say what a great movie "The Usual Suspects" was for a long time, but never got around to watching it...until tonight. I discovered it was available to watch instant stream on Netflix and decided to go ahead and give it a go. I've got to say, I'm pretty disappointed in it.
Once again, I feel I fell victim to hype. People hyped this movie up to be awesome, and I just don't think it was. In my opinion, the movie was OK at best.
The performances were all good. It's just that the movie was so slow...I couldn't believe that it's running time was a slim one hour and forty-five minutes. It felt like it was about two hours and twenty minutes to me.
Then, I just felt the "big reveal" at the end was a little hokey. I mean, if you're that great of a criminal mastermind you would've had your BS story made up long before you ever entered an interrogation room -- for Kevin Spacey's character to have supposedly come up with the details for his story based off what he'd seen on a bulletin board...I'm sorry, but I've got to cry foul! If you've already got the story made up, you're not going to need to find inspiration for names of characters off a bulletin board, but I realize if he hadn't have gotten the names off the bulletin board, the audience wouldn't have really known he was lying the whole time. I get that, but I think the ending requires too much suspension of disbelief.
I'm sure most people who like this movie like it because of its ending. Maybe if you take it for what it is, at a surface level, it might work...but once you start digging a little deeper and actually think about what you've just watched...it's not that great of an ending.
I'll give it some credit for trying to go a different way than most movies of its type do, but that's about all I can really give it credit for. The movie itself was just really slow and didn't really pay off in the end, in my opinion, anyway.
I'd give it maybe a five out of ten. That's about all the more I think it deserves. It wasn't GREAT, it wasn't HORRIBLE...it was just OK.
You can check it out if you want to, but I wouldn't go so far as to say I'd recommend it. Take that for what it's worth coming from an anonymous movie reviewer.