In a Los Angeles interrogation room, the lone survivor of a bloody waterfront explosion tells a US Customs agent an increasingly wild story. He says he was one of five career criminals pulled together for a heist at the direction of a crime boss so elusive that most people who claim to have met him question their own memory. Getting the story out of him is the whole tension of the film, and more than thirty years on, it still plays like a card trick performed in plain sight.
The film started as a magazine headline. Director Bryan Singer noticed a column called The Usual Suspects in Spy magazine, itself borrowed from the order to round up the usual suspects in Casablanca, and asked his collaborator Christopher McQuarrie what they should write together next. McQuarrie's answer was a single image, a group of criminals meeting in a police lineup. That idea grew into nine drafts written over five months, then a six million dollar production shot in thirty-five days around Los Angeles, San Pedro and New York.
Kevin Spacey, Gabriel Byrne and Benicio del Toro lead the five men swept into the plan, with Chazz Palminteri as the agent trying to piece their account together. It is a genuinely great ensemble, one that plays the shifting alliances and quiet dread of five strangers being maneuvered into a job none of them fully understands. Del Toro in particular built his character's mumbled, half-swallowed delivery himself, and it turns a small part into the one everybody quotes.
It went on to win two Academy Awards, best supporting actor for Spacey and best original screenplay for McQuarrie, a rare showing for a film that modest in scale, and it holds an 87 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The structure is the real achievement: a heist movie told almost entirely in hindsight, where the pleasure is in watching a story get assembled out loud while the man telling it decides what to leave in.
That is why The Usual Suspects rewards a second viewing more than almost any thriller of its decade. It is streaming on Amazon Prime Video in the US and the UK, and on Stan in Australia. If you have somehow avoided it this long, or just want an excuse to watch Verbal Kint talk his way through an interrogation one more time, tonight is a good moment.
