Bryan Singer’s crime thriller is tightly controlled, darkly funny and well worth the concentration it demands. Christopher McQuarrie’s plotting keeps us absorbed, though the people can feel thinner than the mystery surrounding them.
Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects is a good evening’s work for anyone who enjoys being made to pay attention. It takes the familiar business of criminals talking about crime and makes every account sound as though it needs checking. Christopher McQuarrie’s screenplay is intricate, funny and sometimes too pleased with its own cleverness, but the film earns most of the effort it asks of us. We recommend it with one reservation: the mystery receives more care than the people caught inside it.
The police line-up supplies five men and an immediate reason to study them. Gabriel Byrne gives Keaton a gravity the story needs, while Benicio del Toro makes Fenster’s contributions sound agreeably peculiar. Stephen Baldwin’s McManus and Kevin Pollak’s Hockney help keep the exchanges abrasive and funny. With Kevin Spacey’s Verbal completing the group, the casting gives us enough differences in temperament to remain interested in who is speaking. McQuarrie’s dry dialogue lets us enjoy their company without asking us to approve of it.
Spacey has the particular difficulty of making Verbal’s narration hold our attention without making the questioning seem redundant. We were uneasy listening to him. The interrogation keeps making us reconsider how much faith to put in the man speaking, and Spacey makes that judgement difficult without losing our interest. That is a considerable acting achievement in a thriller which places so much weight on a man telling a story.
Newton Thomas Sigel’s cinematography gives the film’s nocturnal world a persuasive air of danger. His dark images suit a story in which there is so little reason to trust anyone, and they do not make the actors seem incidental. Howard Cummings’s production design helps the criminal world feel plausible even as the plotting becomes elaborate. The surroundings support the performances without competing for attention, a useful discipline in a film already asking us to keep track of so much.
Editors Peter S. Elliot and John Ottman have a difficult job: the story must remain followable while its telling keeps encouraging doubt. Their cutting maintains the pace through the questioning and the narrated events, with little sense of stopping to explain things. Ottman’s music adds to the unease, and his work across cutting and scoring helps the film maintain its grip. The rhythm matters: a less controlled version of this material could leave us impatient for the questioning to finish.
That reservation about the characters does matter, though. A crime thriller can offer the pleasure of an elaborate puzzle, and Singer is unusually good at sustaining that pleasure, but McQuarrie’s criminals do not always seem to have lives beyond the next piece of information. We can follow their predicament without feeling much concern for them. The humour and the performances prevent the film from becoming dry, yet the cleverness occasionally leaves us aware of how carefully our attention is being managed.
At 106 minutes, it does not give us much opportunity to dwell on that complaint. There is enough enjoyment in listening closely and watching the ensemble to justify the concentration. Choose it when both people on the sofa want to pay attention; this is poor company for anyone also trying to answer messages.
