Who is the Fantastic Keyser Söze?

The Usual Suspects was revived at The Senator Theatre in Baltimore on Wednesday. A city landmark, any movie is improved by seeing it at The Senator; to this day, I’m not sure why people are so harsh on Guillermo del Toro’s 2022 remake of Nightmare Alley, because I saw the black and white version there, the architecture of the film echoed by the grand art deco design of the theater. With 800 seats, I’ve seen it full many times—The Passion of the Christ, Wonder Girls, Troy, Oppenheimer, Top Gun: Maverick, Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, It: Part I, Blade Runner 2049, The Shining, The Deer Hunter, Big Trouble in Little China, Carrie, Nashville, Mulholland Drive, Chinatown—but these days, as everywhere it’s thin. Or thinner. Before the pandemic I went to matinees, and they were often packed at the Landmark Harbor East and The Charles. Even busier at night.

It’s not the virus that’s keeping people from going to the movies more often, as a habit, as part of their weekly or monthly routine. Before The Usual Suspects played, there were trailers for three new movies: The Fantastic Four, Him, and Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale. The horror movie sandwiched in there is a CTE slasher directed by Justin Tripping and produced by Jordan Peele—the jury’s out. Downton Abbey, we’ll see if it’s the “grand finale.” The Fantastic Four trailer was a new one, mostly focused on the Hulk, I mean The Thing, it’s hard to remember. He’s wearing a suit, and random people exhort him to “say it.” What? “It’s clobbering time.” Oh, okay, yeah, it’s coming back to me now… I never liked Fantastic Four comics, I was into Spider-Man and The Punisher.

You can make a good comic book movie: the Raimi Spider-Man trilogy obviously, but also Matt Reeves’ The Batman, which proved that the morgue-like mis-en-scene of the MCU wasn’t the only option for the genre. The problem is that the comic book movie moved from genre into mainstream American movies a long time ago. The strange, massive success of Avengers: Endgame in 2017 dovetailed with the fall of Harvey Weinstein and the further erosion of mid-budget cinema; studio comedies disappeared, even romantic comedies mostly went straight to streaming, with a few exceptions (Anyone But You and Ticket to Paradise) proving that interest wasn’t gone, just product. And more movies went down the black hole that’s straight to streaming, the new direct-to-video. Comic book movies, along with Pixar and horror, were all that theaters, and audiences, were left with.

Seeing The Thing walk slumped in his suit, depressed over the public’s expectations of him, I began to think that this might be why these movies are/were so popular: the studio comedy, romance, and even the domestic drama collapsed into the comic book movie. A non-zero number of adults, some well into middle-age, hang on these movies. Sometimes they cry; mostly it’s a ride, like Scorsese said. That was 2019, the ride’s over, the sight of an earnestly emotional The Thing moping around whatever fake city the Fantastic Four operate out of, maybe it’s New York, left me just as depressed. I feel you, The Thing. Is this stuff that far away from a crime thriller like The Usual Suspects? Not really: Christopher McQuarrie’s script is a blizzard of names and exposition in nested flashbacks, all in service of the twist that we all know.

I’d never seen the movie before, figuring there was no point since it was spoiled long ago. Well, it’s a fine piece of filmmaking by Bryan Singer, the cast does what they can with an overly VERBAL script, although there are some nice moments laid in to support the twist: Stephen Baldwin’s killed in front of Gabriel Byrne, cut to Kevin Spacey reacting to Kevin Pollak’s death. But a false flashback is a shortsighted trick to play on an audience—it doesn’t hold up. There isn’t that much there if you know the ending, and the only thing I can think of that might be of interest on second viewing would be watching Spacey’s eyes as he scans Dan Hedaya’s cork board clippings for names, numbers, and information.

The Usual Suspects was a huge hit in 1995 and hardly forgotten today; I doubt The Fantastic Four will remain in the American consciousness past Christmas. Hollywood? Everyone’s still waiting for the menu to turn over. Maybe Luca Guadagnino’s #MeToo campus thriller After the Hunt will inaugurate a new era when it’s released this fall. I’m looking into the light…

—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits