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The Usual Suspects
Crime Drama / English / 1995
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
This is the 90s movie I've most procrastinated on. Is it good?
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I have long been hard to impress when it comes to crime dramas. Dramas are nearly always a miss for me and making the protagonists all scumbags really doesn't increase my enjoyment.
What certainly doesn't help is when the narrative structure of the movie is difficult to follow and the pacing sucks ass.
I'll be totally upfront by saying that I did not give this movie my complete and undivided attention, but even when I made an effort to focus on what was happening, my attention felt wasted on tedious conversations about characters and events I know and care nothing about.
I don't think I'm entirely to blame for that though because this movie DRAAAAGS.
It takes a full 30 minutes for the main cast of characters to even agree to partner up. That's already a complete and utter failure by the standards of television. If a TV Show can't even get it's ass off the ground by the 15 minute mark of a 30 minute episode, why bother watching any more?
You took HALF the runtime of the first episode, the one you're supposed to lead with, the one that needs to give viewers the strongest first impression, and you can't even fart out the main conceit of the show in that time?
Even when it comes to shows with hour-and-a-half long pilot episodes like Stargate, we're at least establishing the initial conflict in that time.
The Usual Suspects takes twice that long just to get the party together and then it's 50 minutes in by the time they're tasked to the do the ACTUAL central criminal operation of the movie and establish the mysterious Kaiser Soze character.
At least, he would be mysterious, if I wasn't so lost at this point that I decided to pause the movie, look it up, and literally spoil the ending for myself with the top Google search result because I genuinely didn't know if Kaiser Soze was a character I was supposed to have known already.
Nope, he's just Kevin Spacey, who spends the rest of the movie dramatically talking up this Kaiser Soze character and then giving a clearly dubious eyewitness account of how he was out-of-sight and entirely unaccountable during the events in question.
And then it eventually ends with the whole reveal being that he doesn't actually have a limp and we just vomit all of the suspicious and throwaway dialog on the viewer all at once all over again...
You know, even though they do this in Ink too, this is just such an annoying trope. Is this not just a blatant violation of the rule "Show, Don't Tell"? Like you already had the fax of Spacey's face, did you really need to repeat another 50 ****ing lines of dialog we heard already to get that he's been lying and that one or two things he said were obvious foreshadowing?
I just get so much more satisfaction out of connecting the pieces myself, than having it verbatim explained to me... and that's probably what redeems that stuff in Ink for me, because at the climax of the movie, you get just enough information to make the connection and understand the twist before the movie validates what you're thinking.
You just don't get that here, it feels like it's spoonfed to the viewer. "Kobayashi" sounds like a fake name... oh yeah let's save it as the absolutely last thing we show the audience on the bottom of the cop's coffee cup after we dig up all of the other throwaway dialog that felt like a complete waste of time in the moment and the audience would more than likely have forgotten by the time we suddenly ascribe this importance to it out of the blue!
I didn't even realize they were doing the whole Persona 5-style retelling of the events of the story, from the future, in a police interrogation, until I was like halfway through the movie.
I wasn't sure if Spacey's narration had continuity with the interrogation scenes, I didn't know if Spacey's arrival at the PD immediately followed the other scenes establishing "The Usual Suspects"...
And again, I don't feel like my lack of attention should really be entirely to blame here because one of the five characters literally dies offscreen an hour in and we hard cut to the other four burying the body. I had to rewind to confirm I didn't miss him getting shot or something, but no, his death didn't warrant a scene apparently.
Bear in mind, I'm terrible at remembering the names of characters in movies unless they're repeated consistently, and it doesn't help if they have first names and last names and are interchangeably referred to, offhand, by either, when they're not even in the scene!
Another thing that contributed to my lack of ****s given is the total non-starter of an opening scene, where one of the five gets shot by a mysterious character and the boat is set on fire, as we dramatically zoom in on a nondescript pile of rope... only to later not-so-subtlely imply that there is in fact nobody behind the pile of rope.
Who cares? The movie doesn't start with a mystery, I'm not chomping at the bit as a viewer to learn who the mysterious killer is because I'm not invested in the corrupt police department's investigation or the criminals, which just kinda goes back to my issue with crime dramas
At least in a movie like Ocean's Eleven, I feel like it got off the ground much faster; there was more emphasis on recruiting the talent, but there was also more emphasis on preparing for the job, casing the casino, and then the actual operation and twist constituted the third act.
This just seems very lame. And features a twist I'm sure I would have predicted if I didn't spoil it for myself almost immediately.
Final Verdict: [Weak]
The Usual Suspects
Crime Drama / English / 1995
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
This is the 90s movie I've most procrastinated on. Is it good?
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I have long been hard to impress when it comes to crime dramas. Dramas are nearly always a miss for me and making the protagonists all scumbags really doesn't increase my enjoyment.
What certainly doesn't help is when the narrative structure of the movie is difficult to follow and the pacing sucks ass.
I'll be totally upfront by saying that I did not give this movie my complete and undivided attention, but even when I made an effort to focus on what was happening, my attention felt wasted on tedious conversations about characters and events I know and care nothing about.
I don't think I'm entirely to blame for that though because this movie DRAAAAGS.
It takes a full 30 minutes for the main cast of characters to even agree to partner up. That's already a complete and utter failure by the standards of television. If a TV Show can't even get it's ass off the ground by the 15 minute mark of a 30 minute episode, why bother watching any more?
You took HALF the runtime of the first episode, the one you're supposed to lead with, the one that needs to give viewers the strongest first impression, and you can't even fart out the main conceit of the show in that time?
Even when it comes to shows with hour-and-a-half long pilot episodes like Stargate, we're at least establishing the initial conflict in that time.
The Usual Suspects takes twice that long just to get the party together and then it's 50 minutes in by the time they're tasked to the do the ACTUAL central criminal operation of the movie and establish the mysterious Kaiser Soze character.
At least, he would be mysterious, if I wasn't so lost at this point that I decided to pause the movie, look it up, and literally spoil the ending for myself with the top Google search result because I genuinely didn't know if Kaiser Soze was a character I was supposed to have known already.
Nope, he's just Kevin Spacey, who spends the rest of the movie dramatically talking up this Kaiser Soze character and then giving a clearly dubious eyewitness account of how he was out-of-sight and entirely unaccountable during the events in question.
And then it eventually ends with the whole reveal being that he doesn't actually have a limp and we just vomit all of the suspicious and throwaway dialog on the viewer all at once all over again...
You know, even though they do this in Ink too, this is just such an annoying trope. Is this not just a blatant violation of the rule "Show, Don't Tell"? Like you already had the fax of Spacey's face, did you really need to repeat another 50 ****ing lines of dialog we heard already to get that he's been lying and that one or two things he said were obvious foreshadowing?
I just get so much more satisfaction out of connecting the pieces myself, than having it verbatim explained to me... and that's probably what redeems that stuff in Ink for me, because at the climax of the movie, you get just enough information to make the connection and understand the twist before the movie validates what you're thinking.
You just don't get that here, it feels like it's spoonfed to the viewer. "Kobayashi" sounds like a fake name... oh yeah let's save it as the absolutely last thing we show the audience on the bottom of the cop's coffee cup after we dig up all of the other throwaway dialog that felt like a complete waste of time in the moment and the audience would more than likely have forgotten by the time we suddenly ascribe this importance to it out of the blue!
I didn't even realize they were doing the whole Persona 5-style retelling of the events of the story, from the future, in a police interrogation, until I was like halfway through the movie.
I wasn't sure if Spacey's narration had continuity with the interrogation scenes, I didn't know if Spacey's arrival at the PD immediately followed the other scenes establishing "The Usual Suspects"...
And again, I don't feel like my lack of attention should really be entirely to blame here because one of the five characters literally dies offscreen an hour in and we hard cut to the other four burying the body. I had to rewind to confirm I didn't miss him getting shot or something, but no, his death didn't warrant a scene apparently.
Bear in mind, I'm terrible at remembering the names of characters in movies unless they're repeated consistently, and it doesn't help if they have first names and last names and are interchangeably referred to, offhand, by either, when they're not even in the scene!
Another thing that contributed to my lack of ****s given is the total non-starter of an opening scene, where one of the five gets shot by a mysterious character and the boat is set on fire, as we dramatically zoom in on a nondescript pile of rope... only to later not-so-subtlely imply that there is in fact nobody behind the pile of rope.
Who cares? The movie doesn't start with a mystery, I'm not chomping at the bit as a viewer to learn who the mysterious killer is because I'm not invested in the corrupt police department's investigation or the criminals, which just kinda goes back to my issue with crime dramas
At least in a movie like Ocean's Eleven, I feel like it got off the ground much faster; there was more emphasis on recruiting the talent, but there was also more emphasis on preparing for the job, casing the casino, and then the actual operation and twist constituted the third act.
This just seems very lame. And features a twist I'm sure I would have predicted if I didn't spoil it for myself almost immediately.
Final Verdict: [Weak]