The Usual Suspects Review

Christopher McQuarrie's screenplay is an engineering exercise. Everything the audience believes comes from one man in one room talking to a customs agent who wants a name, and the film leaves the evidence of its own fabrication in frame the entire time. The reveal is not the coffee cup; the reveal is that you were watching a man read a wall. Kevin Spacey plays Verbal as ingratiating and small, which is why the change in his gait at the end lands as a physical joke rather than a plot beat.

The heist and harbor material is competently rather than beautifully shot, and Newton Thomas Sigel's flashbacks lean on smoke and backlight in the mid-nineties mode. Chazz Palminteri supplies the ballast, playing Kujan as smart enough to be worth deceiving. The lineup scene, largely improvised and famously ruined by laughter, gives the crew a chemistry the script does not otherwise provide. Some connective tissue exists only to be retracted, which is the honest cost of the design. As construction, it is close to airtight.