And that’s exactly where Soze screwed up as the OP points out. He didn’t know about the survivor, so he thinks he got clean away. But since the artist’s sketch identified Kent as Soze, they now have Soze’s fingerprints, very likely his DNA and almost certainly a mug shot (taken when Kent was booked as a suspect). As soon as they show Kent’s mugshot to the survivor, they have a positive ID. So the Interpol guys or whomever are after Soze, now have ALL kinds of tools they didn’t have before for identifying Soze.
And they found Keaton’s on a boat in San Diego. The details are irrelevant. All that is relevant is that Keaton left New York for some reason and was shot dead by Keyser Soze a few days later.
Edie could have been kidnapped to make him cooperate. And her death came after Keaton was no longer needed.
True, in “reality,” Soze killed the witness but exposed himself greater than he had hoped. However, it wasn’t really a screwup as we don’t actually know what happened between the lineup and the boat explosion. He was found out one way or the other. And the fact he was able to get away with it and…
“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.”
I wonder if the line up in NY ever happened. If soze had the resources, financial and information, to orchestrate the line up, he should have the resources to just hire a crew and imbed himself in it to ID his victim. With the amount of gunfire going on you would have to expect a police response that you might not be able to avoid. If he’d aready established the Verbal Kint dossier, he’d only have to stall long enough to make bail. That’s why he improvised such an elaborate tale. Figure he knew Kujan was involed in picking up Keaton at the restaurant, used that fact as the hook, then dazzed 'em until he could get the hell out of there.
Or maybe I’ve spent more time thinking about this than the writer did.
If they hadn’t been aware of his true identity, they’d probably just assume that Keaton/Soze/Other Bad Guys picked up Verbal and that he now frolicks with the fishes.
Unless I’m mistaken, Kaiser Soeze was the name on the bottom of the china coffee cup the detective was drinking from. Which I could never get to jibe with the guy in the hospital. Maybe that’s a plot hole. Or maybe Kaiser Soeze owns a china company?
No, the name on the bottom of the coffee mug was Kobayashi. That is what made Kujan know he had been fooled. Getting to LA would not be that difficult. Soze could have called them together about their history. Kint made up Redfoot to keep the story moving with a minimum of reality. Remember, Kobayashi was brought up after Kint had tried the red herring of Redfoot.
Another scene that’s outside of Kint’s narrative (unless the movie is cheating) is when Keaton and McMannis are arguing in the engine room of the ship. Clearly he’s not related this scene to Kujan, which means those two actually were looking for “dope on the boat”. It might not be true that any scene without Kint had to be real, but since he later tries to argue that there was dope on the boat, at least that scene has to be real.
Again, assuming the movie is playing fair.
Oh, I don’t know. Once we know that there’s no dope on the boat, then it’s not hard to imagine a scene like that playing out. In terms of Kint’s narrative, even just “McManus and Keaton searched the whole boat, but came up dry” explains nearly everything in the sequence well enough.
I think in the slow opening pan of the boat, the camera passes over the body of a man dressed in black with a knife in the back of his neck, which matches McManus’s fate in Verbal’s story, for what that’s worth. I wouldn’t assume anything about why Keaton et al were there. Verbal/Soze could’ve told them just about anything, if all along he was planning to be the sole survivor. As for the emerald robbery and the gunfight in the parking garage, there’s no independent verification of either.
Incidentally, it wasn’t Kujan’s bulletin board. The office and board belonged to Sgt. Rabin, played by Dan Hedaya.
That’s more or less what I figured with it. It’s FAR from the simplest thing to do, but it seems to fit, more or less. Complicated as a motherfucker, that’s for sure.
I guess we know that the initial arrests and lineup occurred. Then they travelled to LA and had a gunfight on the boat. And Edie Finneran was found dead in PA.
How Kaiser got them to LA is only related by Verbal. So all that information is suspect. Hell, he could have told them, “I’m Kaiser Soze and I need you guys to kill a man on a boat in LA.” We have no reliable way to know.
Just to add an extra layer of indirection to this…what if there is no Keyser Soze?
What if he’s nothing but a legend invented or propagated by Verbal Kint? Given the apocryphal nature of the stories about him, it’s clear that no one really knows who Soze is. Maybe he’s just a bogeyman Kint created as a blind–a story that’s taken on a life of its own. With enough fear wrapped around the myth, the name alone becomes sufficient to cover Kint’s activities.
[sub]Hey, quit throwing things! I’m just trying to have a little fun, here.[/sub]
There is also the appreciation for the story of a story.
Of course, out here in the real world we know this was just a movie. And in the movie world most of the story is a made of story. It stretches the idea of reality and plot, myth and allegory. Most movies pretend like they are real inside the plot - Usual Suspects has you assuming that is the case all along, then tells you “oh, but we are just hearing a story.”
Thing is, the plot twist has and willl get ripped off and spoofed so often that ten years from now, some 20 year-old will watch it for the first time and figure it’s cliché.
Actually, it wasn’t a knife, it was a lead pipe. You may think I’m joking, but I got that from the DVD commentary. Basically, all sorts of aspects of the story changed from initial conception through shooting and editing - except the pipe. Weird, eh?
Can’t be. The burnt Hungarian mentioned him and the FBI agent (Jack Baer) immediately perked up his ears. He’d heard of him and mentioned that he knew some other guy in law enforcement who was obsessed with Soze. At least that part, that Soze existed as a story, was true.
Precisely my point. I didn’t mean that Kint made him up on the spot–I was suggesting (albeit somewhat facetiously) that Soze was a legend/persona Kint had long established to cover or support his own activities.