The Usual Suspects

365 Films

Entry #54

The Usual Suspects (1995)

Directed by Bryan Singer

I don’t have too much to say about Bryan Singer’s 1995 indie genre sensation, The Usual Suspects.  It is a film that has gained a certain amount of esteem in some circles while also garnering a very serious backlash in others.  I would say to those groups that you are both doing it wrong while planting my feet firmly in the non-committal middle.  Don’t get me wrong, it is ingeniously entertaining, the cast is exemplary from top to bottom, and the famous twist at the end while more satisfying in concept than it is in its schematic execution, does give the film a nice needed jolt of daring.  It is in those final moments that the complete vision of the film emerges from the smoky ruins and it is there that one might see more of a film school prank than a coherent vision.  As I said, you can skate by very easily on a high entertainment quotient.  What I will choose to focus on in this entry is the experience of seeing the film for the first time at the tender age of eleven.  This will be a question I pose to my beloved readers in that, do you think it’s necessarily shocking that an eleven year old might have walked out of this film thoroughly confused as to the meaning of the proceedings that just unspooled in front of him?  I only ask for a friend of mine…ah, who am I kidding, it was me.  I remember it so vividly, walking out of the theater and turning to a family member and asking: “so…what happened?”  Again, being the age that I was and the fact that the entire structure of the film seems to sort of beg this question to be asked makes this moment all the more unremarkable.  I only bring it up because it would become a habit of mine at much more embarrassing ages later in life when very obvious narrative twists would become diabolical moves in a game of eleventh dimensional chess that I was entirely ill-equipped to decipher.  That and I got distracted very easily sometimes during bad movies.  I now want to wrap this up by sharing some hometown Delaware lore with all of you.  Considering most of the people who read this blog are actually from Delaware, this may all be an exercise in futility but I will trudge forth nonetheless.  There was a theater in the Concord Mall shopping center known simply as the Concord Mall 2 and it is in this theater where we saw The Usual Suspects.  We also saw Pulp Fiction, Smoke Signals, Pecker, and Gremlins 2 for that matter, it was a theater that played any and all kinds of films.  To this day I never really got a grasp on what the objective of the place was, seeing as how it volleyed back and forth between the art house world and that of mainstream Hollywood cinema.  It’s just amazing to think there was a theater merely fifteen minutes away from the house where I grew up that was playing the shit only in available in the bigger, cooler cities.  It was all so accessible that I find it kind of mind boggling.  I have to say this theater played a large part in my growing appreciation for the medium.  Were it not for the easy access afforded by the Concord Mall 2, I’m sure dozens of titles on my favorites of all time lists would have easily slipped through the cracks.  To whoever owned and operated that theater for all those years, I offer you my sincerest gratitude from the very bottom of my heart.  I can’t remember the exact year it closed but it was a very devastating development for me.  The Best Buy that stands in its stead now has discarded any traces of that grand old movie palace that once was.  Where I was once making monumental cinematic discoveries people can now buy Catwoman, Jeepers Creepers 2, and Without a Paddle: Nature’s Calling at low, low, low prices.