Less than meets the eye

Rating: Null/10 (5 February 1999)

Watching The Usual Suspects gave me a feeling of emptiness. There was so much happening on the screen, such good acting, so many plot twists. Yet it all adds up to much less than it appears, largely because everything about the plot, the characters, and the dialogue turns out to be completely arbitrary. What is it about, really? I can try to describe what it seems to be about. I am afraid I will fail to cover all the bases, because this is the kind of movie that requires much notetaking, index cards, organization charts and detailed presentations to keep track of the plot. 5 men meet when they find themselves in the same holding cell after being arrested for various petty offenses. They swap war stories about their various lines of work, and one of them brings up the fact that he stumbled across a startling piece of information: plainclothes detectives are using unmarked cars to provide armed transport for mafia bosses willing to shell out good money for this service. After being let out they set one of these cars on fire, to draw media attention to this fact. This sort of thing is the stuff of male bonding, I guess, because they decide they like working together. A mysterious man shows up (Pete Postlethwaite, in a nice performance). He offers them a lot of money to do a job for his "client". The job involves stealing cargo from a European freighter docked in the city harbor. It comes out that it is really an excuse to get the men aboard to eliminate a witness who could put his "client" at risk. Eventually, the client, they are told, is Kayser Sozay, a notorious Hungarian crime lord whose very name causes stark fear in those who speak it. Legend has it that he killed his own wife and children when rival drug lords attempted to drive him out of town. If I have missed anything, please excuse me, but I believe in doing so I have made my point. The Usual Suspects is the kind of movie that demonstrates what it means when critics say a film has too much plot for its own good. There are many twists and turns, and surprises. I am not averse to surprises but in the end I felt manipulated, as though there was no way to sort out all the details to make sense of what had transpired. The ending suggests that everything we have seen may never have happened. Did it? I felt as if I didn't care. If the filmmakers don't care enough about their own plot I can hardly be expected to. It's too bad, because the movie wastes a good cast. Kevin Spacey is fascinating, Gabriel Byrne does a good job with his role, as do Pollack and Postlethwaite. I enjoyed Chaz Palminteri as the detective assigned the joyless task of discovering who Sozay is. But it takes too much energy to follow this, and the performances are lost in a maze of plot devices. Enjoy it for the acting, but take along a notebook if you plan to piece together the story afterward.