The Usual Suspects (1995)

“The Usual Suspects” torched my film-freak brain 15 years ago. The smoke lingers. Haven’t seen it? Stop reading. I can’t talk about “Suspects” without spilling the end to this crooked crook’s tale. See, Bryan Singer is director and Christopher McQuarrie is writer, but Kevin Spacey is God here. The other characters and we in the audience are his chess pawns. We open on a cargo ship on fire with bodies everywhere before jumping to one survivor in an ER and another in police custody, getting grilled. Rhetorically. Not literally. We only think Spacey’s sickly conman Roger ‘Verbal’ Kint is spilling to the cops. But Kint is really Keyzer Söze, the devil himself. His whole confession is a mixture of truth and sly lies that can never be unraveled, and I gladly fall for the ruse every time. The ending is obvious now. It’s Kevin fhk’n Spacey. But in 1995, we still lived in a ‘Who is this guy?’ world, and Netscape didn’t help. Having an actor play chess master has never felt so damn good. A