The Usual Suspects
Ernest Larsen
BFI Modern Classics, paperback, 96 pages 
Review by Hassni Malik (2001)

In 1999, director Bryan Singer’s film brought the art of storytelling back to mainstream cinema. Up until then the audience was always one step ahead of the director, right down to knowing what the next line of dialogue would be. And of course the hetero hero would always walk into the sunset with the girl at the end. But Singer’s film engages the audience in much the same way that Kurosawa’s Rashomon does: by not allowing us to be privy to inside information, and thereby pulling the rug from under our preconceptions. 

In The Usual Suspects Roger ‘Verbal’ Kint (Kevin Spacey) spins a yarn for an all too eager Agent David Kujan (Chazz Palminteri). He gives Kujan exactly what he presses him for, much in the way that Singer gives us what we want: a male crime fantasy of intricate twists and smartarse wise cracks. In the end the realization that he’s being taken for a ride comes too late for Kujan, as it does the audience. Rather than walking away from the pacey film feeling cheated by a tricksy ending, we want to dive back in again to pick up on all the clues that we missed the first time around. Amazingly enough, on second viewing, the clues really are all there. Christopher McQuarrie’s script has no loose threads. Most interesting of all, however, Hollywood has given us a film in which the bad guy wins. 

Film critic Ernest Larsen’s enjoyable walk through the film has an angle. He demonstrates that the key to understanding the film, and how it subverts the crime genre, is in understanding it as a film about what it is to be male. A provider, a team worker, someone who gets the job done. In that world a woman is a threat to a man’s ability to get that job done. OK, so nothing new, but what is interesting is his revelation of the inspiration for Keyser Soze. In 1971 in New Jersey, pillar of the community John List methodically slaughtered his family at home. He was no brute of a man, but merely an average man who loved his family and who, due to mounting debts, could no longer see a way to provide for them. He regarded death to be a better option for them than a life of poverty. This ability to justify murder is what Larsen and Singer – in the form of Keyser Soze who kills his own family rather than have them die at the hands of killers – are getting at when they claim the film is about exploring that definition of Manhood. 

How far this book enlarges our appreciation of the film is questionable. While it’s no stinker like David Lubin’s take on Titanic, it fails to capture the imagination like Iain Sinclair’s book on Crash. But then, what does?

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