Brock Landers
11-21-2000, 05:59 PM
"The Usual Suspects" - A Bryan Singer Film (10/10) - A Brock Landers Overview...
...biting...conspicuous...brilliant...remarkable.. .astounding...top-notch...hypnotic...phantasmogoric...un-fucking-believable. All of these words have been used by reviewers to describe this amazing film (...actually I did add the last one). At the very least, "The Usual Suspects" is a densely constructed , completely involving one-two knockout of a flick. It's not about making a film that shows how many films the director has seen...it is about giving the audience something great to remember...all the while helping them to forget...
Who is Keyser Soze? A modern day master criminal or a soulless brute who is nothing more than a sociopathic killer who has made it to the top? Does he masterfully play all sides against each other, escaping the squeeze and leaving no trail? Or does he even exist?
We start with a blazing shipful of burnt corpses...27 to be exact, missing drug money...again $91 Million...and one conscious survivor...a talkative, ineffectual small time crook named Verbal (Kevin Spacey), who narrates the convoluted incidents that lead up to the flaming vessel. Spacey has, of late, become a top box office performer and in this film we have yet another reason why. Spacey's Verbal is a slick and sullied gimp who apparently is not as simple as he would seem. Chazz Palminteri plays his inquisitor, a customs agent who doesn't believe in fairy tales and mystical criminals...you know, the stuff of legends.
It all begins weeks earlier when purely "by chance", five big time crooks are arrested on suspicion of a truck heist in New York, then left to decompose in a holding cell next to the lineup room. There's the smooth ex-cop (Gabriel Byrne), a violent young punk (Stephen Baldwin), a tough-talking hoodlum (Kevin Pollak), a bizarre Hispanic dude named Fenster (Benicio del Toro) and Verbal the Gimp...
Left together in their particular predicament, they come up with a plan to get revenge on the cops ("fuzz", "smokey", whatever) and make a little dough in the meanwhile.
[NOTE: Bryan Singer vividly re-invents everything from the robbery to the gunfight to the hostage taking...making for thoroughly interesting cinema...]
Then Pete Postlethwaite turns up, representing "Mr. Soze", and things really become complex...the layers of the plot pile higher and higher...then we are back and forth from a shitty police lieutenant's office in San Pedro to some foreign land as Palminteri tries to make some sense of Spacey's dialogue...or rather monologue...and what, pray tell, are we left with? Scraps of paper and a broken coffee mug? No...
...What we are left with is the skillful ingenuity of the ensemble acting...the subtle yet compelling method of storytelling...and the magical way in which Keyser Soze ends up completely dominating the movie, even if we never see him...or do we? (smile)
Gabriel Byrne (his role was rumored to have been offered to Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper & Alan Rickman first) is solid, but definitely the blandest character in the film. Stephen Baldwin is superb as a shoot first, question later tough little son-of-a-bitch. Kevin Pollak as a fast-talking "Ratso Rizzo"-type of hood is at the top of his game and definitely a most memorable portrayal. Benicio Del Toro leaves a strong impression which definitely has helped his career, and of course, Kevin Spacey inevitably gets the best lines...
Overall: (10/10) A brutally captivating film...and I mean that in the best possible way, dig? (I wonder if Keyser Soze made me say that?)
[for the cinematically inept, Ratso Rizzo is the dirty, slimy, con artist that Dustin Hoffman played in "Midnight Cowboy"]
...biting...conspicuous...brilliant...remarkable.. .astounding...top-notch...hypnotic...phantasmogoric...un-fucking-believable. All of these words have been used by reviewers to describe this amazing film (...actually I did add the last one). At the very least, "The Usual Suspects" is a densely constructed , completely involving one-two knockout of a flick. It's not about making a film that shows how many films the director has seen...it is about giving the audience something great to remember...all the while helping them to forget...
Who is Keyser Soze? A modern day master criminal or a soulless brute who is nothing more than a sociopathic killer who has made it to the top? Does he masterfully play all sides against each other, escaping the squeeze and leaving no trail? Or does he even exist?
We start with a blazing shipful of burnt corpses...27 to be exact, missing drug money...again $91 Million...and one conscious survivor...a talkative, ineffectual small time crook named Verbal (Kevin Spacey), who narrates the convoluted incidents that lead up to the flaming vessel. Spacey has, of late, become a top box office performer and in this film we have yet another reason why. Spacey's Verbal is a slick and sullied gimp who apparently is not as simple as he would seem. Chazz Palminteri plays his inquisitor, a customs agent who doesn't believe in fairy tales and mystical criminals...you know, the stuff of legends.
It all begins weeks earlier when purely "by chance", five big time crooks are arrested on suspicion of a truck heist in New York, then left to decompose in a holding cell next to the lineup room. There's the smooth ex-cop (Gabriel Byrne), a violent young punk (Stephen Baldwin), a tough-talking hoodlum (Kevin Pollak), a bizarre Hispanic dude named Fenster (Benicio del Toro) and Verbal the Gimp...
Left together in their particular predicament, they come up with a plan to get revenge on the cops ("fuzz", "smokey", whatever) and make a little dough in the meanwhile.
[NOTE: Bryan Singer vividly re-invents everything from the robbery to the gunfight to the hostage taking...making for thoroughly interesting cinema...]
Then Pete Postlethwaite turns up, representing "Mr. Soze", and things really become complex...the layers of the plot pile higher and higher...then we are back and forth from a shitty police lieutenant's office in San Pedro to some foreign land as Palminteri tries to make some sense of Spacey's dialogue...or rather monologue...and what, pray tell, are we left with? Scraps of paper and a broken coffee mug? No...
...What we are left with is the skillful ingenuity of the ensemble acting...the subtle yet compelling method of storytelling...and the magical way in which Keyser Soze ends up completely dominating the movie, even if we never see him...or do we? (smile)
Gabriel Byrne (his role was rumored to have been offered to Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper & Alan Rickman first) is solid, but definitely the blandest character in the film. Stephen Baldwin is superb as a shoot first, question later tough little son-of-a-bitch. Kevin Pollak as a fast-talking "Ratso Rizzo"-type of hood is at the top of his game and definitely a most memorable portrayal. Benicio Del Toro leaves a strong impression which definitely has helped his career, and of course, Kevin Spacey inevitably gets the best lines...
Overall: (10/10) A brutally captivating film...and I mean that in the best possible way, dig? (I wonder if Keyser Soze made me say that?)
[for the cinematically inept, Ratso Rizzo is the dirty, slimy, con artist that Dustin Hoffman played in "Midnight Cowboy"]