Six Suspects Summary

[Bonny Battaglino]

Thefirst time I saw "The Usual Suspects" was in January, at the Sundance Film Festival, and when I began to lose track of the plot, I thought it was maybe because I'd seen too many movies that day. Some of the other members of the audience liked it, and so when I went to see it again in July, I came armed with a notepad and a determination not to let crucial plot points slip by me. Once again, my comprehension began to slip, and finally I wrote down: "To the degree that I do understand, I don't care." It was, however, somewhat reassuring at the end of the movie to discover that I had, after all, understood everything I was intended to understand. It was just that there was less to understand than the movie at first suggests.

The story builds up to a blinding revelation, which shifts the nature of all that has gone before, and the surprise filled me not with delight but with the feeling that the writer, Christopher McQuarrie, and the director, Bryan Singer, would have been better off unraveling their carefully knit sleeve of fiction and just telling us a story about their characters - those that are real, in any event. I prefer to be amazed by motivation, not manipulation.

The movie begins "last night" in San Pedro, Calif., where an enormous explosion rips apart a ship. Who set the explosion? Why? A cop named Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) wants to know. He has one witness to question: a shifty-eyed, club-footed criminal named Verbal, played by Kevin Spacey with the wounded innocence of a kid who ate all the cookies. Kujan and Verbal are closeted much of the time in the cop's cluttered office, where Verbal lives up to his name by telling a story so complicated that I finally gave up trying to keep track of it, and just filed further information under "More Complications." The story is told in flashback. We learn about a truck hijacking some weeks earlier, and the five suspects who were picked up by the police. They're a mixed bag of low-life characters, played by Gabriel Byrne, Stephen Baldwin, Benicio Del Toro and Kevin Pollak, in addition to Spacey. I'm not sure if they were all involved in the hijacking, but the way Verbal tells it, in jail they began to plot a much larger crime, involving millions of dollars of cocaine.

This is no ordinary heist, because the dope belongs to a mysterious figure named Keyser Soze (sounds like "so-zay"), a Hungarian mobster so fearsome that when some bad guys threaten his family to get to him, he kills his family himself, just to make it clear how determined he is. This Soze is like the hero of a children's horror story; the very mention of his name curdles the blood of even these tough guys. But no one has ever seen him, or knows what he looks like. And then there is Mr. Kobayashi (Pete Postlethwaite), Soze's right-hand man, who is himself so sinister that we begin to wonder if perhaps Kobayashi himself is Soze.

The interrogation between the cop and the suspect falls into a monotonous pattern: friendliness, testiness, hostility, a big blow-up, threats, reconciliations and then full circle again. We hear amazing stories about Soze (one survivor of the boat explosion, with burns over most of his body, drifts in and out of a coma but can talk of no one else). As Verbal talks, we see what he describes, and his story takes on an objective quality in our minds - we forget we're only getting his version.

To the degree that you will want to see this movie, it will be because of the surprise, and so I will say no more, except to say that the "solution," when it comes, solves little - unless there is really little to solve, which is also a possibility.

The Usual Suspects is a 1995 crime thriller film[5] directed by Bryan Singer and written by Christopher McQuarrie. It stars Stephen Baldwin, Gabriel Byrne, Benicio del Toro, Kevin Pollak, Chazz Palminteri, Pete Postlethwaite, and Kevin Spacey.

The film was shown out of competition at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival[6] and then initially released in a few theaters. It received favorable reviews and was eventually given a wider release. The praise went towards the mystery elements, the screenplay, the plot twist and Spacey's performance. McQuarrie won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and Spacey won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance. The Writers Guild of America ranked the film as having the 35th greatest screenplay of all time.[7]

Career criminal Dean Keaton lies badly wounded on a ship docked in San Pedro Bay. He is confronted by a mysterious figure he calls "Keyser," who shoots him dead and sets fire to the ship. The next day, the police recover 27 bodies and only two survivors: Arkosh Kovash ("kos Kovcs"), a Hungarian mobster hospitalized with severe burns, and Roger "Verbal" Kint, a physically disabled con artist. U.S. Customs agent Dave Kujan flies to Los Angeles from New York City to interrogate Verbal. The men are left alone in a borrowed office belonging to LAPD police sergeant Jeff Rabin while FBI agent Jack Baer visits a hospitalized Kovcs. The events that led Keaton, Verbal, and their associates onto the ship are then described by Verbal via flashback.

Six weeks earlier in New York City, Keaton and Verbal are arrested alongside fellow criminals Michael McManus, Fred Fenster, and Todd Hockney and placed in a police lineup as suspects in a truck hijacking that none of them admits to participating in. Believing the police were unfairly harassing them, McManus proposes they pull a heist to get revenge on the NYPD. Trying to go straight, Keaton initially refuses but eventually agrees to help rob a jewel smuggler being escorted by corrupt cops, netting millions in emeralds and getting over fifty cops arrested after leaking their activities to the press. They then go to California to fence the jewels through a man named Redfoot, who connects them with another jewel heist, but it goes badly and the contents are instead revealed to be China White (synthetic heroin). The men learn that the job was arranged by a lawyer named Kobayashi, who says he arranged for their arrests in New York and that his employer, mysterious Turkish crime lord Keyser Sze, from whom each of the men has unwittingly stolen, has ordered them to raid a ship holding Argentinian drug dealers and destroy $91 million worth of cocaine being sold on board. The cash brought for the exchange will be their reward.

During Kujan's interrogation, he learns that there was no cocaine on the ship, and Sze was seen onboard. At the hospital, Baer learns that Kovcs has seen Sze and has a sketch artist begin making a picture. Verbal then tells Kujan a legend about Sze: he was a small-time drug runner who murdered his own family when they were being held hostage by Hungarian mobsters, then massacred the mobsters and their families before disappearing, and from then on conducted business only indirectly through underlings who are mostly unfamiliar with their true employer. Sze thus became a fearsome urban legend, "a spook story that criminals tell their kids at night."

Concluding his story, Verbal reveals that Fenster was killed after trying to flee; the men then threatened Kobayashi, only to accept the assignment when he threatened their loved ones. The men attacked the ship during the night, killing several Argentinian and Hungarian gangsters before discovering that there was no cocaine. An unseen assailant killed Hockney, McManus, Keaton, and a prisoner in one of the ship's cabins. The mysterious figure then set fire to the ship as Verbal looked on from a hiding place on the dock.

Kujan deduces that Keaton must be Sze, as the prisoner killed on the ship was Arturo Marquez, a smuggler who escaped prosecution by claiming that he could identify Sze. Marquez was represented by lawyer Edie Finneran, Keaton's girlfriend, who was recently murdered. Kujan claims that the Argentinians took Marquez to sell him to Sze's Hungarian rivals. Keaton then used the assault so that he could kill Marquez personally and fake his own death. Verbal finally confesses that Keaton had been behind everything, but refuses to testify in court. Verbal's bail is posted, and he is released.

Moments later, Kujan realizes Verbal seemingly fabricated his entire story, improvising on the spot by piecing together details from random items in Rabin's cluttered office. Verbal walks outside, gradually losing his limp and flexing his supposedly disabled hand. As Kujan pursues Verbal, a fax arrives at the police station with the artist's facial composite of Sze. The picture resembles Verbal, revealing that he was Sze the entire time. Sze enters a car driven by "Kobayashi" and leaves, moments before Kujan arrives on the scene. A voiceover from Sze is then heard from when he spoke to Kujan earlier, saying "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist, and like that ... he's gone."

Sze's character is based on John List, a New Jersey accountant who murdered his family in 1971 and then disappeared for almost two decades, assuming a new identity before he was ultimately apprehended.[15] McQuarrie based the name of Keyser Sze on one of his previous supervisors, Kayser Sume, at a Los Angeles law firm where he worked,[16] but decided to change the last name because he thought that his former boss would object to how it was used. He found the word sze in his roommate's English-to-Turkish dictionary, which translates as "talk too much".[8] All the characters' names are taken from staff members of the law firm at the time of his employment.[8] McQuarrie had also worked for a detective agency, and this influenced the depiction of criminals and law enforcement officials in the script.[17]

Singer described the film as Double Indemnity meets Rashomon, and said that it was made "so you can go back and see all sorts of things you didn't realize were there the first time. You can get it a second time in a way you never could have the first time around."[18] He also compared the film's structure to Citizen Kane (which also contained an interrogator and a subject who is telling a story) and the criminal caper The Anderson Tapes.[14]

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