Viking Night: The Usual Suspects
By Bruce Hall
December 7, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com

One of these guys has the other three killed. Only the Baldwin deserves it.
Most consumers have no problem loving a huge budget blockbuster. Movies that are meant to appeal to the widest possible audience usually do just that. But some films have a narrower vision, or simply contain more complex meaning than meets the eye. They aren't always art, and they aren't always even very successful. But for a devoted and eccentric few, they're the best entertainment money can buy. Once, beginning with Erik the Viking, a group of dedicated irregulars gathered weekly in a dingy dorm room to watch these films and discuss how what pleases the few might also appeal to the many. Time has separated the others in those discussions so that I alone remain to ponder the wider significance of cult cinema. But while the room is cleaner and I no longer have to skip class to do it, I still think of my far off friends whenever I hold Viking Night.

When I was a little boy, I was certain that my death would be at the hands of a guy in a red jumpsuit with horns, a pitchfork and a handlebar moustache. Let me clarify – I come from a pretty fundamental upbringing, so I was convinced from an early age that if I didn’t behave, You Know Who was going to come get me. He was under every rock, behind every bush and without a doubt hiding under my bed and in the back of my closet. That’s really a terrible thing to do to a kid if you ask me, but my preternatural fear of the Prince of Darkness kept me out of trouble more than once, so I guess it was all for the best. As I got older I let go of that fear, but we humans are superstitious creatures, and often it’s the devil you don’t see that you should most fear and who creates the most sorrow. This is the driving idea behind The Usual Suspects, the breakout indie sensation that put director Bryan Singer on the map. Together, Singer and screenwriter Chris McQuarrie created an enduring, convoluted caper both typical of mid '90s crime drama and evocative of the very best noir thrillers of years past. Bryan Singer has made a handful of good films, and while Superman Returns was not one of them, The Usual Suspects absolutely is.

Like most good stories, this one begins with a rather simple concept. Five felons are brought together for a police lineup after a mafia gun shipment goes missing. They’re placed in detention together in the hope that one of them will crack and give the police a lead. While there, they plan a brand new heist that ultimately leads to disaster for most of them. But like a lot of '90s crime thrillers, The Usual Suspects is shot out of sequence, so before we find out what went wrong, the film shows us the aftermath. A ship in the port of Los Angeles is nearly destroyed by fire during a blown drug deal and the only survivors are a badly burned crew member and one of the five hoods – a shifty, physically disabled small timer named Verbal (Kevin Spacey). The DEA is very interested in Verbal, since one of his partners was an ex-cop named Keaton (Gabriel Byrne) who has already faked his own death once to escape capture. The DEA sends Special Agent Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) to interrogate Verbal and he doesn’t have long to do it, since the clever crook has managed to work out an immunity deal with the DA and is set to be released on bail in two hours. The drugs are still missing and the entire investigation hangs in the balance, and depends on what Kujan can wring out of this smarmy little man.


Unable to believe that a master criminal like Keaton is truly dead, Kujan makes Verbal tell the whole story from the top, and the audience is taken along in the form of flashbacks, from Verbal’s perspective. His four accomplices are a motley assortment of conflicting personalities and complimentary talent, but it begins to seem as though they were too smart for their own good, as each time they work together they find themselves drawn deeper into the bowels of the criminal underworld, culminating in the fatal incident at the harbor. It becomes obvious that Verbal is hiding something, and when the other survivor from the boat awakens, he mentions a shadowy crime lord named Keyser Söze, whom he claims was behind everything. Kujan confronts Verbal, who is forced to admit that he was afraid to mention Söze for fear of reprisal. According to Verbal, Keyser Söze is a criminal genius whose legend is so powerful, whose reach so vast and whose wrath so terrible that his name is only spoken in hushed whispers even by the most hardened killers. No one has seen him, no one knows who or where he is, and nobody who has crossed him has ever lived. Kujan is forced to decide whether Söze is real and Verbal is telling the truth, or whether Verbal has simply concocted a cover story to buy time for Keaton to escape.

If this sounds complicated, it is and it isn’t. One of the most common complaints levied against The Usual Suspects is the complex plot. I’ll admit that I was never able to entirely follow it myself until I finally decided to grab a pen and take some notes. It reminds me of the noir classic The Big Sleep, whose story is so confusing that the author who wrote it famously remarked that even he wasn’t sure who the killer was. But while The Big Sleep is a literary train wreck, The Usual Suspects does make sense on paper, for the most part. But as with any great noir, the joy is less in the solving of the crime as it is in the journey and in the Payoff at the end. The Big Sleep is usually excused from making sense due to the fact that the dialogue crackles, the characters jump off the screen and the Payoff is that Bogart and Bacall are electrifying as they toy with each other and eventually come together at the end. The Usual Suspects is similar in that each of the leads is ideally cast – they commit to their performances, they clearly enjoy working together and the dense, wordy script is so fiendishly clever that you almost don’t care how it all turns out, just as long as it keeps going. And when the Payoff comes – when we discover the truth about Keaton and Keyser Söze – the moment is almost as chilling as Rosebud, almost as obvious in retrospect as “I See Dead People.”

If it’s true that the devil you don’t see is the one you should fear, it is equally true that should you happen to see him, he isn’t likely to be what you expected. And in this case, the surprise is well worth the ride.

I am not the sort of person who likes to try and figure out a complex movie while I am watching it. For me, trying to be smarter than the film tends to distract me from actually watching it, meaning that I miss more than I learn. But this is the kind of film that makes you want to decode it, and the “aha” moment at the end is so satisfying because you were sure you had everything all figured out, but in your heart you knew you were going to be wrong. My suggestion is to just let it happen – even once you know the ending, upon successive viewings you still find yourself noticing things that you didn’t see before, and it makes each time almost like a new experience. I’m not saying the plot doesn’t have holes – trust me, it does. But to discuss them would be to spoil the whole movie so if you haven’t seen The Usual Suspects, I highly recommend that you do and if you already have, you should watch it again. But don’t try to follow the story so much as let the story lead you. If you’ve ever taken a trip on a train, you know that the best thing about it is simply staring out the window, letting the scenery draw you in and the thrill of the experience envelop you. Only then can you understand how cool it is to ride a train. To do anything different would be to miss the point entirely.