The Usual Suspects

Storyline

Directed by Bryan Singer and brilliantly scripted by Christopher McQuarrie—who won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay—The Usual Suspects is universally celebrated as one of the finest, most intricately constructed neo-noir mystery crime thrillers of all time. The film opens in the smoldering, fiery wreckage of a cargo ship in the Port of Los Angeles, where 27 men have been massacred and $91 million in cocaine has mysteriously vanished. Customs agent Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) interrogates one of only two survivors: Roger 'Verbal' Kint (Kevin Spacey in an Oscar-winning, career-defining performance), a meek, physically disabled small-time con artist with cerebral palsy. Through a series of mesmerizing, convoluted non-linear flashbacks, Verbal recounts how five disparate career criminals—Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne), McManus (Stephen Baldwin), Fenster (Benicio del Toro), Hockney (Kevin Pollak), and Verbal himself—were detained in a retaliatory New York police lineup and subsequently blackmailed into pulling off an impossible heist by Kobayashi, the inscrutable legal representative of Keyser Söze: a ruthless, ghost-like Turkish underworld kingpin whose very name strikes terror across global syndicates. Culminating in the single most legendary, breathtaking twist ending in cinematic history, The Usual Suspects is an undisputed storytelling masterclass in deception, memory, and suspense.