The Usual Suspects

I don't know if I can review this movie. In order to do so, I would have to have had an inquisitive mind, watching critically so that I would have something semi-important to say when it came time to talk about it. Instead my experience of The Usual Suspects was overshadowed and dwarfed by the fact that I knew what was going on. By having the knowledge of one piece of information, which has been called by many as the greatest twist in film history, the process of watching the film was different for me than it was for anybody who had the good fortune to go in completely blind.

It has been said that with movies like this, with such narrative-changing twists (see The Sixth Sense, the movie gets better the second time to you see it, so that you can see how masterfully the deception was concocted and so that you can catch all of the hints that were dropped that you can't believe you failed to catch the first time around. My problem, though, is that the first time I saw The Usual Suspects was like watching it the second time, but stripped of the shock and wonder of seeing it for the first time and feeling compelled to see it again.

When you see this movie like I did, every part of it changes. You feel sympathy for the wrong people, you know better than to get dragged along false trails, and you lose sight of why people think Kevin Spacey deserved an Oscar for his performance. Instead, one has to focus on little enjoyable moments to get through to the ending - things like Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne)'s immediate regret after punching Verbal Kint (Spacey) or things like anything that Benicio Del Toro does when the camera is on him. But the real bread and butter is in the last ten, unraveling minutes that, if you knew already, play into your expectations rather than blowing them out of the water. It is for this reason that I get upset when people ask me for spoilers, or when they tell me what happens in series that I don't even have any interest in seeing. On the off chance that I do, I want to be surprised, because no-one is ever going to take another Usual Suspects away from me.