Bryan Singer
I Soliti Sospetti

Translator: "wants the guarantee... his life is in danger... he's seen the devil... he's looked him in the eyes..."

Lieutenant: "wait a minute... ask him to tell you what he told me: who is the devil?"

Translator: "... Ki az ördög?"

Patient: "... Keyser Söze..."

"The Usual Suspects" is a film by Bryan Singer dated 1995, doubly awarded at the 1996 Academy Awards (Best Supporting Actor Kevin Spacey, Best Original Screenplay), at the BAFTA the same year, and the undisputed winner of the Independent Spirit Awards.

Allow me then, in a completely personal way, to define it without a shadow of a doubt as the best work of the American director's career.

Thus, in an era characterized by massively produced little movies, hypermuscular superheroes, and female sexuality slaves (and perhaps even slavers) made into induced self-awareness, this film, casts a glance back to bygone and extinct times. To the concept of the detective film, for example, and first of all understood as the active participation of the actor's expression, aimed at making the perceptivity of what the plot proposes indecipherable; to the thriller, where the flow of blood is what it honestly should be and remain: pure aesthetic outline, not a point of arrival; to the screenplay, unfettered from the contemporary "popular" concept of the BEGINNING - END OF FIRST HALF (now revoked) - THE END mechanism, a fundamental structure for attracting the viewer's interest. Each of these requirements corresponds to a lack. Complete. Total. Explicit, Paroxysmal. Almost comical, and easily discernible in today's cinema.

The cast first of all: Kevin Spacey, Benicio Del Toro, Gabriel Byrne, Chazz Palminteri, and Pete Postlethwaite above all. Capable actors, unleashed, well-directed, unbound from what is the current concept of making cinema: selling an aesthetic-corporeal product as an identifier. On the contrary, the story proposed in this film: a reality not too far from what concerns us closely, populated by thefts, corruption, malice, and deviant cunning, all well fictionalized and entrusted to the narrating voice of Verbal Kint, the main speaker of the events that follow within contexts and links between situations and people that are not easily definable among themselves. But even more than this, the concept of concealment, masterfully interpreted by the screenplay, and here proposed as the foundation of our beloved society-container: made of smaller fish and larger fish; up to the final detachment, separated from the controllable mass, and controlling the mass itself: crime, the real one, seen in its barest, cruelest, and most unscrupulous key.

If we can talk about realism in this film, then we must refer to the verisimilitude of the facts presented here, with current life. Yes, because what is credible are the stories and the related events concerning the characters, such as to have made this masterpiece a true totem-theme of worship. Feature films like this, along with a few others, are indeed able to guarantee the ignition of that stimulus (now dormant and) present in each of us, namely that inexplicable and irritating curiosity towards the manifestation of randomness, or so-called as such, of the facts, which appear to us no longer as the fruit of fortuitous and individual actions, but rather as the first and complementary mechanism of a larger, terrifying, and crushing design that controls everything, moves everything, or removes everything at its arbitrary pleasure.

I believe, in fact, that in the film reviewed here lies one of the greatest expressive and descriptive attempts ever made, concerning the instrumentalization of man "made object" (or as usually pronounced, "pawn") for the achievement of purposes little understandable for those forced to keep their heads raised to the sky and thus look from below upwards.

Look at what?

The evil.

Ultimately: more than a film:

Cop: "number 5, step forward!"

Verbal Kint: "give me those keys, cocksucker..."

VERSION FOR ALTERNATIVE-DEBASERIAN CINEMA ILLUMINATI

There's this guy, right? One who looks like d'Artagnan without a mustache, and who's also the protagonist, damn it. This guy here used to be a cop, right? But then a tub explodes at the port and so other cops force him to show up at the police station along with other jail leftovers, one of whom is the guy who played the nutcase in Seven, right? Then he's the one who did that other film where he wanted to screw his daughter's friend, right? And then he gets killed by a neo-Nazi gay guy, I mean in the other movie! Then these guys team up, and try to pull off a heist all together—right? But something happens, you know? Because they've stepped on the toes of someone larger, right? And then it's a real mess!!

But I won't tell you the ending because I spent 12 euros to buy the DVD at Esselunga, so if you want to see how it ends, go buy it yourself!