Review

This witty and ingenious noir thriller is a delicious up-and-down ride on a twisting plotline that involves a rag-tag assemblage of small-time hoods who, having met in a lineup, join forces and commit to performing one job together. Predictably, this leads to further involvement that ultimately begins to get out of hand. The group's reluctant leader, Dean Keaton (Byrne), is a former big-time grifter whose best efforts to go straight can't get him off the most-wanted list of Special Agent Kujan (Palminteri). He's joined by a couple of smaller hoodlums (Baldwin and Del Toro), a weapons expert (Pollak), and a talkative, crippled flunkie known as Verbal (Oscar winner Spacey). Opening with a grisly massacre on a lonesome San Pedro, California, pier, the film unfolds through flashback as the tale is told by Verbal, the lone survivor, to a rapt agent Kujan. To further thicken the already Byzantine plot is the lurking presence of a mythical, almost Mephistophelian underworld figure known as Keyser Söze, who may be the mastermind behind the massacre. Spacey walks away with the movie; his Verbal is a study in criminal paranoia accented by physical vulnerability. Director Singer and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie (another Oscar winner) team up well with cinematographer Howard Cummings to create a brilliant and timeless crime story that's an immediate classic of the genre.