Hello this is jake winters for eye on the triangle this is snowverated and today I will be taking a look at the film the usual suspects.

The first thing that stuck out to me about this film when watching it was its view point. It is limited Omniscient, meaning it knows all but only from a selected perspective. A lot of movies use this type of perspective because it allows the writer to confuse the audience with unimportant or irrelevant information and generally mislead. The Usual suspects used it in that way to create a great climactic moment at the end like most films but its perspective was never clearly one or two people. Most of the time a story will follow one or two characters around in a story and use them as the guideline for choosing what is known to the audience. The usual suspects used an investigation as its guideline. We get a glimpse of the actual crime in question at the beginning of the film but then are taken to the viewpoints of the men being accused of the crime. This then changes to the investigative portion that is the rest of the movie where there is actually no way to tell if what is being shown actually happened because it is only one man’s story of the events.

The movie doesn’t spoon feed the story to you like many mainstream films like to these days. We don’t get dialogue to explain the actions of the characters and can only infer their motives. This is the way good movies should be written for the most part in my opinion. There is value in explaining complicated parts of plot to an audience through dialogue but it should never be the only way information is conveyed in a movie. The frame and set should communicate as much information about the plot of the movie as the dialogue and actions of characters do. If you don’t use framing as a way to convey message it is like you are putting together a puzzle without gluing it together at the end. It isn’t wrong to not glue a puzzle together when you are finished with it and there is nothing wrong with doing that but if you want the puzzle to last you glue it together.

The acting is without a doubt extremely well done. I was convinced by the performance of the man for the entire movie and the ending was shocking. I was so shocked by the ending that I am almost convinced that the actor actually did not know what was going to happen to his character or what his character did until they got to the final scenes in the movie. The people chosen for the roles fit perfectly. I can’t quite put into words why but the attitudes of the men just fit their appearances so well that the dynamic of the main group of criminals worked spectacularly. There weren’t really any clichés in the movie in terms of characters besides a man coming out of retirement to go back into a life of crime which really works itself out in the end to not be the case anyway. Using clichés to write a movie is not always a bad thing but the fact that they left out many that inhabit the genre of criminal thrillers makes it all the more original and refreshing to see. If you need an example of clichés for a crime movie look at the Italian job. It is a great movie but it follows a pretty obvious pattern.

As I said before this movie tells a lot of its story through visuals. In fact the most unexpected part of the movie comes completely through visuals which leaves you wondering if what you are seeing is actually what happened. You have to pay attention to the story enough to understand what you are seeing and so in effect you are being rewarded for doing so. I love this way of concluding the movie because they never straight up tell you what happened and you can only really guess but everyone knows what happened overall. It leaves the little details up to the audience to figure out.

I am going to give this movie an 7.5/10. It tells story through picture and not audio and has one of the best plots I have seen in a while. The reason I am giving it a lower score is because of its length. It went on for a little too long. I think maybe they wanted to draw out the visuals so you knew what you were seeing but I think the effect would have been better if they left out a lot of the subtleties that were included. They do make the movie more interesting and give it character but they also take away from the overall effect of the movie by making it tedious to watch at points.

This movie along with almost all of the other movies I have reviewed are available on amazon for 2.99. Thank you for listening to this weeks edition of eye on the triangle and snowverated. I hope you enjoy the rest of your evenings