The enormous cult and critical success of The Usual Suspects is enduring. The style is there, all right. The film is loaded with excellent character actors, and the hip editing and screenplay inflicts mind games on its overly impressionable viewers. The 'shocking' final plot twist only serves to invalidate much of what went on before; these things work better when the instead add meaning to it, as in The Sixth Sense.

All these cool characters who wave guns and swear at each other. Shades of Tarantino, but as usual, without the master's genius. Tarantino augments tight direction and storytelling with character quirks and a deft insertion of pop culture.

In contrast, The Usual Suspects slickens a familiar heist flick, then spins the dial to see who comes out alive and who is Keyser Soze. It can be anyone, which makes the ending more like a board game (i.e. "Clue") instead of a story.

The Usual Suspects is the male version of "Charlie's Angels". Just as our trio of wooden beauties never meet Charlie, our quintet of cool hoodlums never meet the legendary Soze, who nonetheless controls their actions. The result is a ship capture with a death toll greater than the climax of Hamlet, but to less purpose.

Let's see, one witness can finger Soze. He's kept in a well-guarded boat. A drug deal is invented to provide a pretext to kill the guards, so that our clubfoot can climb aboard to kill the snitch. As well as his partners in crime. He lets himself get arrested, knowing that he will receive immunity for telling only half of what he knows. He doesn't look or sound Turkish to me. The shaggy dog story simply doesn't work, no matter how hip each of the bad guys might be.

And how hip they are is actually in doubt. Fenster (Benicio Del Toro) looks like a pimp, and is mostly unintelligible. Kevin Spacey apparently inspired rumours of his homosexuality with his performance in this film. Gabriel Byrne is miscast as a machine gun toting killer. Stephen Baldwin is simply annoying, while Kevin Pollak hardly makes an impact. These guys aren't nearly as much fun as their obvious inspiration, the crooks in Reservoir Dogs.

Despite its problems, The Usual Suspects soon became a popular cult film. It won two Oscars: Best Supporting Actor (Spacey) and Best Original Screenplay (Christopher McQuarrie). It also won three British Academy Awards: Best Film, Best Screenplay, and Best Editing (John Ottman). But remember, Titanic won a bunch of awards, despite a story as waterlogged as the ship itself.

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