Hard to believe that another year has passed, but it is indeed time for another Long Dark Marathon of the Soul. Going into it this year, I decided to do things a little bit differently. Instead of a 'must-watch' kind of list, which doesn't really work with blind watches anyway, I've decided to be as candid with these films as I am with my other write-ups. Which may mean you see more than a couple of entries that's mainly me calling a movie shit, but that's the gamble you take when it comes to art, I guess. And no matter what I think of the movie post-watch, I've taken a lot of time to try and root out the stuff that looks the most interesting or that deserves the most attention. That way, even if you don't agree with my opinion (and you wouldn't be the first), at least you'll be turned on to something you might end up enjoying. Which has been the point of this list since the beginning, and will remain the point until I stop.
Anyway, let's get things started...
Any action, if done well enough, can be considered an art. Painting, composing music, cooking, the arrangement of flowers in a vase or furniture in a room, and even crime. Indeed, there have been a countless number of films, books, television shows etc. dedicated to the ‘art’ of crime; Tales of men and women who live life on the edge, navigating webs of intrigue and danger, flipping the bird to society’s rules, all the while shooting big guns and collecting piles of sweet, sweet dosh in the process (and occasionally getting shot in a poignant moment near the end of the story). While the reality is much more mundane and terrible than the romanticized picture of it we get in pop culture, the thrill that comes with the idea of ‘getting away’ with something and the removal of normal life’s restrictions make for some powerful escapism. We may not actually want to be a Cuban drug lord but all of us want to be Tony Montana, if you catch my drift.
So arrives 1995’s The Usual Suspects, directed by Bryan Singer, which attempts to take it’s place amongst the annals of good crime thriller movies. A flaming boat and 27 dead Hungarian gangsters in an high-stakes drug deal gone bad have the L.A.P.D very interested, and crippled small-time conman Verbal Kint is the only one with any knowledge of what really happened on that night. Through a series of flashbacks, he tells us a story of Fenster (Benicio del Toro), Hockney (Kevin Pollack), McManus (Stephen Baldwin), Kint (Kevin Spacey) and Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne), a collection of criminals who are arrested and harassed by the NYPD over the theft of a truck full of gun parts. Feeling vengeful, the Suspects decide to team up and pull one over on the NYPD, which ends up being wildly successful. However, a move to L.A raises the stakes, and soon the crew discover the horrible truth: Each of them has done something to cross Kaiser Sozey, the mysterious and ruthless criminal mastermind who is as much fantasy as flesh in America’s underbelly. Reconciliation is unlikely, retaliation impossible. Their only choice is to pull off one last job, and hope they don’t end up dead in the process…
The Usual Suspects seems to owe much of its success to two things: it’s choice of cast and it’s Shyamalan style twist, which was actually three years before M. Night got into the game with The Sixth Sense. While cultural osmosis has pretty much taken care of the twist at this point (you could also probably figure it out if you just thought about it for a bit), I will give it credit for the casting. The characters tend to fall into common archetypes, McManus is the douchey alpha male, Pollack is the wiseass who just wants get paid and so on, but they make the character their own and they all play off each other well. All except Gabriel Byrne, who plays the world-weary ex-cop Dean Keaton, and along with Kevin Spacey is the major focus of the story. You’d think that with that amount of screentime along with the narrative drive of protecting his girlfriend and pulling the fabled ‘one last job’ that’d he come across as a more interesting character, but he honestly doesn’t. It’s like his charisma is inversely proportional to his importance in the film.
The problem is, the vast majority of that character interaction that really makes this movie is frontloaded into the beginning of the film, and then you start seeing the holes in the armor. Like the soundtrack, which should be tense and exciting and instead comes off as goofy and melodramatic (more comic booky than any of Singer’s later comic book movies). Or the fact that that a story that revolves around plans within plans and all that are incredibly hard to do right without coming across as hokey and circumstantial. Once you understand the nature of the story, you have to wonder why a supposed mastermind like Sozey would leave so much up to chance and why he would bother using these guys, and it goes ‘clever story writing’ to ‘that’s the way I wanted to tell the story so that’s what’s happening’. That’s the problem with writing thrillers and mysteries, you can’t just go ‘because I say so’. Coincidence might be a cornerstone of fiction but you have dress it up a little, you have to properly build up to it or else any sense of tension is lost. Which is what happens to The Usual Suspects by the end; it appears to be present an intriguing howdunit type mystery, but the further we work back from the solution the less coherent the narrative becomes, and the less valuable the mystery becomes in the face random circumstance. Use coincidence in moderation is the lesson the day.
See also: the first half of Death Note with L as compared to the second half with Near.
Of course I might be a bit overly critical, and cultural osmosis may not have affected everyone as I assume it has, so check it out yourself if you’re interested. It may not rank amongst the greatest crime movies I’ve ever seen, but it’s an enjoyable enough time that it pairs well with popcorn and friends. As long as your friends aren’t the type to over-analyze movies that is, which explains a lot about my life.
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