The Usual Suspects

2 Pages 515 Words

THE USUAL SUSPECTS
By: Ashley Fox-Castillo

“The Usual Suspects” is a murder mystery that has a full script filled with layers of flashbacks, stories within stories packed with cloudy clues. The audience is forced to be a participant in the elaborate story of mystery, director Bryan Singer made the film in such a way that the audience has to fill in their own clues from beginning to end. Throughout the entire movie you feel your mind being played with, but you do not know how or by whom, you won’t even guess it until the last few scenes of this stimulating movie.
“The Usual Suspects” starts off with ex-cop Keaton (Gabriel Byrne) and a mystery man at a boat explosion in San Pedro, California-Last Night. The scene jumps from California to New York City six weeks earlier with the NYPD collecting five suspects, McManus (Stephen Baldwin), Hockney (Kevin Pollak), Fenster (Benicio del Torro), Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey), and finally Keaton. They are being held for questioning relating to the hijacking of a truck with guns in it. I enjoyed how the transitions between each man getting arrested by NYPD switched with noises or action. For example, McManus goes first, the last few seconds of his scene gun shoots are heard and the next scene opens with a paint can shaking. The sounds were so similar, if not exact, and only the image on the screen changed taking us from McManus to Hockney. At the end of Hockney’s scene he throws a towel at the camera causing a black out screen bringing us to Fenster on the streets getting arrested. Director Bryan Singer also used the noise transition when bringing us from the past to the present. A loud fog horn sounded in the background and the scene is brought back to San Pedro, California at the aftermath of the boat explosion.
The five are gathered together again by a polite criminal (Pete Postethwaite) who claims he works for the mysterious Keyser Soze, whom we have never seen. Soze...