Customer Reviews

The Usual Suspects (BFI Modern Classics)

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A fan of The Usual Suspects? Then this little BFI book may add a little to your appreciation for the movie. Do not worry, it does not spoil any of the layers of detail and ambiguity. In places, it actually helps clarify them to better appreciate what is going on onscreen.

The book starts off strong. Both director Bryan Singer and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie grew up close to the real life family murderer John List. Perhaps the shadow of a man who wipes out his family and goes on the lam for close to two decades planted a seed in the minds of the young boys, who later twisted and tweaked it a bit to come up with Keyser Soze's central and defining act. The book explores those twists and tweaks as the movie upends a number of noir genre clichés.

The book then delves into the wonderful world of the criminal mastermind pulling all the strings, a regular feature of movies and comics (and novels - think of Professor Moriarty of Sherlock Holmes' fame). But Soze, as is pointed out her is different, he is out in the open among everyone. Author Ernest Larsen explores the myth of Soze within the film as well as the ambiguity of his true identity for the viewers. Apparently, at certain points, every actor in the gang had been led to believe he was Soze, with Gabriel Byrne so misled that it was not until he saw the finished product that he found out that he was not.

Larsen loses steam halfway, though. The middle part of the book (and it is not that long!) does not seem to really have a point. There is so empty verbiage about the nature of manhood and homoerotic undertones in the movie, which seem to be a favorite of authors in the BFI series for some reason. It is not until the end, when the final act of Soze's identity is revealed, that the book picks back up a little. Even then, Larsen cannot help but provide one hell of an unintentional thigh slapper by comparing the "ultramalevolent" Soze to that other "demonic" institution - multinational capitalism, which "pitilessly rules the world's economies without opposition in the post-communist era." Oh Good Lord. Where to begin? And why even bother? One could write an entire dissertation on that convoluted mess.

Well, the bad with the good so they say. I call it like I see it.

Larsen's enjoyable and thorough criticism is a must have for any fan of the film. It does, however, read at times like a prepared speech for a film festival, complete with Power point images. Larsen dwells a bit too much on the homoeroticism of the dialogue perhaps, but it's great bathroom reading.