The Oscar-winning movie Roger Ebert thought was overrated
As one of the highest-profile film critics in the business, Roger Ebert’s opinion always carried a great deal of sway among both fellow reviewers and those who followed his analysis in print and on-screen. That being said, he was happy to go against the grain and disagree with the merits of many classics, including a two-time Oscar-winning thriller.
Acting as the breakout movie for both its director and screenwriter, Bryan Singer’s second feature, The Usual Suspects, saw him reunite with scribe Christopher McQuarrie, who’d co-written 1993’s Public Access alongside Michael Feit Dougan. Their first film marked the duo out as a pair of creative talents well worth keeping an eye on, but the labyrinthine mystery elevated their respective careers to the next level.
In addition to recouping its modest $6million budget 11 times over at the global box office, The Usual Suspects would win McQuarrie an Academy Award for ‘Best Original Screenplay’, with Kevin Spacey taking home the trophy for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for his rug-pulling performance as Verbal Kint, who was eventually revealed to be the mastermind behind the entire narrative in one of the modern era’s most famous twists that became such an indelible pop culture moment it was parodied everywhere from Scary Movie to Key & Peele via Saturday Night Live.
However, Ebert was never impressed by its charms, even though he made a point of watching it twice, as he revealed on his website following a second viewing: “The first time I saw The Usual Suspects was in January, at the Sundance Film Festival, and when I began to lose track of the plot, I thought it was maybe because I’d seen too many movies that day,” he pondered.
Adding: “Some of the other members of the audience liked it, and so when I went to see it again in July, I came armed with a notepad and a determination not to let crucial plot points slip by me.”
Despite going in with an open mind that maybe things would be different the second time around, Ebert couldn’t help but note that “once again, my comprehension began to slip”. Not only that, but he was dismissive of what he deemed to be an overly convoluted narrative, espousing that “to the degree that I do understand, I don’t care”.
As it turned out, Ebert had followed every story thread perfectly fine; he just wasn’t won over by the way in which they were ultimately unfurled: “It was, however, somewhat reassuring at the end of the movie to discover that I had, after all, understood everything I was intended to understand,” he said. “It was just that there was less to understand than the movie at first suggests.”
The majority of critics and audiences may have been blown away by The Usual Suspects, but Ebert was nonetheless happy to place himself in the minority who believed that Singer and McQuarrie “would have been better off unravelling their carefully knit sleeve of fiction and just telling us a story about their characters,” based on his assessment that he prefers “to be amazed by motivation, not manipulation”.
