The Usual Suspects Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
The Usual Suspects, a 1995 American movie, stars Kevin Spacey, Gabriel Byrne, Stephen Baldwin, Benicio Del Toro and Kevin Pollak. The oscar winning screenplay and star cast create one of the finest crime narrative films ever made.
Verbal Kint (Spacey), a small-time con, is in a police interrogation, and tells his interrogator, Agent Kujan (Chazz Palminteri), a convoluted story about events leading to a massacre and massive fire that have just taken place on a pier in Los Angeles. Using the traditional narrative format, Kint's story takes on a darker tone when he reveals the involvement of Keyser Soze, an underworld kingpin whose ruthlessness and influence have a legendary, even mythical status among law enforcement agents and criminals alike.
The movie starts with 5 crooks being brought together in a police line up in order to recruit them for a job by an unknown crime boss (Keyser Soze).
Verbal relates the story of a group of suspects who are forced to do a "favor" for Keyser Soze: to interfere with a drug deal. Unbeknownst to the characters, the whole thing is a setup, with the intended goal of murdering a threat to Keyser Soze, rather than drugs. As verbal relates his story each scene raises more questions than it answers. When we learn how the "usual suspects" are brought together, it becomes clear that Keyser Soze, a character about whom nobody seems to know anything, is the fascinating focus of the entire movie. The question: "Who is Keyser Soze" hangs right until the end. During the interrogation, it is revealed that the entire, incredibly detailed, story told by Verbal is made up. Just like the made up story that Verbal is telling, the audience realizes that Verbal himself is made up, and he has fooled both Agent Kujan and the audience. A man who his FBI interrogtor dismissed as a fool is transformed before the audience's eyes into a charismatic, intelligent master criminal.
The screenplay is outstanding in showing the interplay between Kujan and Kint, who successively leads his interrogator on, reading his desires and creating a story the fulfils his most treasured theories. This interplay could only have been accomplished through film - in a book the glances and cigarette drags during the interrogation would be boring. In the film the audience watches and learns from these along with Kujan, and they convey more than words ever could. In the end, Verbal has created a fiction that completely swallows Kujan.
The film takes its name from a line in Casablanca: "Round up the usual suspects." It was directed by Bryan Singer, whose credits also include X-Men, X2, Public Access, and Apt Pupil.
Writer Christopher McQuarrie earned the 1995 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the script of The Usual Suspects.