After 30 years, ’The Usual Suspects’ still has us asking what really happened
Long before his disgrace, and that of his director, Kevin Spacey broke through in 1995’s Oscar-winning crime thriller.
What really happened at the end of The Usual Suspects? I’ve probably seen the movie 20 times in the last 30 years, including once again this week, but I’m still not entirely certain about the answer to that question.
I’d offer a spoiler warning, but I kind of feel like most people know the movie’s ending by this point.
At the end of the film, one of the great twist endings in film history is executed: We discover that Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey), the weak-willed small-time criminal who we just saw seeming to wilt under the pressure of a movie-length interrogation from Customs Agent Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri), was in fact the mythical criminal mastermind Keyser Soze, a figure who strikes fear in the hearts of cops and criminal alike.
We learn that Verbal had lied about most of the things he said in the previous two hours, lifting parts of the story from words he saw on the bulletin board of the cop’s office; a line of dialogue at the beginning explains that it’s not Kujan’s office, so he didn’t recognize all the names while having his back to the board.
So we know that Verbal is Soze, that he was the mastermind behind the film’s events, and he killed the other four criminals and numerous other people over the course of the narrative. “Kobayashi,” presumably, really was Verbal/Keyser’s lawyer, although that wasn’t really his name.
But the question to ask is, if the story Verbal told wasn’t true, then what is true?
That’s mostly ambiguous, although we know that the different characters in the lineup really did exist, and die, and the different crimes — the New York’s Finest Taxi service robbery, and later the boat explosion — happened in some form. It would appear that the whole purpose of allowing himself to be arrested and interrogated was to convince Kujan that Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne) was really Keyser Soze.
