I generally like “caper” movies, but they have to make a certain amount of sense. I’m not sure what I’m missing in “The Usual Suspects”.
SPOILER ALERT!!!
Assuming Kevin Spacey really is the big bad guy, did his scheme fail? Consider
– He hatches a plot of byzantine complexity in order to personally kill a guy that knows him by face.
– He successfully kills that guy, but another guy sees him, and lives to describe him to a police artist.
– He walks out of the police station due to dumb luck and a dimwitted police detective. (Maybe this isn’t fair. I figured it out halfway through the move, but I had the advantage of knowing in Hollywood movies, it’s ALWAYS the guy that’s made to seem particularly unlikely.)
– He still has charges against him. He’s just out on bail. Once he skips, even the most dimwitted detective is going to start to suspect him. If he didn’t skip though, then he would have to risk putting himself back in police custody.
– So the net result of his machinations is that instead of having one guy that could ID him, he has his picture and fingerprints on file with the police.
That can’t have been what he was going for, right? Maybe Pete Postelthwaite is actually the bad guy, and it was all a big misdirection? Or did he just screw up really badly? He was smiling smugly at the end though. I don’t get it.
I don’t think he (Keyser) realized there was a witness (the burned-up guy in the hospital). So from his POV, he walked out scott-free; he probably thought that the most they would ever have on him was an outstanding warrant/skipping bail as the deformed “Verbal Kent.”
You think they can catch Keyser Soze? You think a guy like that comes this close to getting caught and sticks his head out? My guess is you’ll never hear from him again.
Who is Keyser Soze? He is supposed to be Turkish. Some say his father was German. Nobody believed he was real. Nobody ever saw him or knew anybody that ever worked directly for him, but to hear Kobayashi tell it, anybody could have worked for Soze. You never knew. That was his power. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. And poof. Just like that, he’s gone.
He becomes a myth, a spook story that criminals tell their kids at night. Rat on your pop, and Keyser Soze will get you. Keaton always said, “I don’t believe in God, but I’m afraid of him.” Well I believe in God, and the only thing that scares me is Keyser Soze.
To give a semi-serious answer to the OP, The Usual Suspects doesn’t really bear up to scrutiny. There are very few actual supervillains. It’s really an excuse for a bunch of brilliant gangster poetry, which Dio and I have been quoting.
However, you could simply say that Soze finally screwed up. As Ex-tank notes, he didn’t plan on a survivor. Also, he may not have planned on being caught, even as Verbal. He was improvising, and figured he’d just be out as Kint. But then, why did he copy so much of his story from Dave Kujan’s bulletin board? Possibly because he had to make up an elaborate story really quickly. It’s a bit of fanwanking, but it works for me.
Since a lot of the details from his bullshit story he made up on the spot from looking at the bulletin board, is the legendary past of Keyzer Soze also made up?
Did he really kill his family, go after his enemies and burn their entire town to the ground…od did he just have a bit of self-aggrandizement?
He said there were a few stories of Soze going around, and this one he believed.
That’s a great point. All we really know is that there’s a burning ship, a bunch of dead guys and 2 survivors. Verbal made a bunch of the story up…but how much? There’s no way of knowing and that’s just how he likes it.
There’s a scene in Ocean’s Eleven where, in order to introduce himself to master pickpocket Linus Caldwell, Danny Ocean picks Caldwell’s pocket.
I really liked that little scene because it gave you some background into Ocean’s career as a criminal; it shows Ocean as a true professional thief. For most of the movie he’s a slick talking, brains-of-the-op con man, but here and there you see him demonstrate the basic skills of the profession, as it were.
That’s what I found appealing about Soze’s Verbal Kint schtick. We know he’s played Kint before because we know, at the very least, the the other usual suspects thought he was Verbal Kint. Even conceding that we can’t tell all the lies from the truth it’s a safe bet he had Keaton hoodwinked. So here’s the great master criminal Keyser Soze, feared by criminals everywhere, having to fall back on the most basic con man schtick to fix a problem. It’s a neat touch.
We don’t know that at all. All the players in his entire story are dead. For all we know, he (Kaiser) brought on Keaton as a hired gun and later shot him…Other than the parts where the police are involved, Verbal could have made it all up.
The lawyer character Edie Finneran is “real”, in that the cops note at the end of the movie that her body has been found, but beyond being reasonably certain she was Keaton’s girlfriend (I assume the circumstances under which Keaton, Fenster, Hockney and McManus were arrested at the beginning of the movie were legit), the extent of her involvement is unclear. Redfoot and (to some extent) Kobayashi, I could buy as being inventions of Verbal.
He accomplished more than just the one killing – all of his crew “owed” him. Maybe that guy they offed in the parking garage, too? And he made a little money along the way, right? Plus that second crew they met up with, did he want to see their head guy in person?
It’s been a while - how was Verbal apprehended? Was that an accident, or did he want to hang around the police station for a while for some reason?
I’d wondered about the wisdom of giving up fingerprints too, though. And DNA, in this day and age.
The burned guy in the hospital was real, and he really thought he’d seen Soze, and the fax of the sketch really looked like Verbal, and Verbal disappears in a fancy car with a driver…not what you’d expect from a street con.
It’s hard to tell what part of the story was made up. The emeralds and Redfoot? The NY cops would know of a burned up car, but maybe not the loot. How would Verbal be able to get the crew to LA? Just hope that McManus would want to fence some stuff there at the same time the ship was in port? Would the crew trust Verbal’s LA fence if it was really his idea to go to LA? That’s the part that gets me, how would Verbal get a crew that doesn’t know he’s Soze out to LA without blind luck about needing to fence some stolen loot.
Verbal was also arrested at the same time as the other four Suspects. So we know that part is true because Kujan would check.
Something tells me Verbal didn’t mind being caught because his fingerpoints are only on file as “Verbal Kint, small time con man” and not “Keyser Soze, the world’s greatest criminal mastermind.”
Plus, we also know the scene in the beginning where Soze shoots Keaton is real because it was shown outside the story. Likewise with Kobayashi at the end. He’s a real person (at the very least he’s Soze’s assistant), but his involvement in the story is suspect and his name is most likely not Kobayashi.
I’m not sure the movie was as carefully plotted as, say, The Sixth Sense. I’ve tried to figure out what was real and what was Verbal’s story, but didn’t have much luck. (Anybody done a web site on it yet?)
However, we know Keyser Soze (the name and reputation) is real. When the burned guy was babbling in Hungarian the the cop ignored it until he heard ‘Keyser Soze’, at which point he immediately became interested, and started calling other law-enforcement types (evidently the Soze task force).
(OK, I guess I’ve spent too much time watching TV movie channels). Well, the whole Redfoot thing is made up: I noticed somewhere in the cop’s office a painting of the gazebo-type thing where the group met Redfoot both times.
That’s my take, too. Still makes me wonder how Verbal got the crew to LA. If it wasn’t to fence stolen loot, Verbal had no weight with the crew to get them to up and go to LA to rob a ship. The only one who could have got them all to go would have been Keaton, but it was Verbal/Soze who needed to hit that ship. How could he just arrange for Keaton to happen to want to go there? Tell him a story about a ship to rob in California just so he could tag along and silence a witness?
Why does it have to be crime related? We know Edie was in California at the same time as the boat explosion (Kujan mentions finding her body). All we need is Keaton in California. And accompanying his girlfriend Edie on a business trip takes care of that.
The real question is (and I’m kicking myself for not remembering) do we ever find out if Kujan and company have found the bodies of Hockney and McManus? Becuase they don’t need to be on the boat for any reason. But if they are there, it… complicates… things.