Alternate conclusions of The Usual Suspects

Alternate conclusions of The Usual Suspects - Black and Red Paper Bags on White Background

I've heard Stephen Baldwin talk about The Usual Suspects fellowships who meet and try to pin the Keyser Söze identity on characters other than Verbal. I know that Verbal is the true Keyser Söze, but does anyone know any of these alleged proofs and particulars for other characters being Keyser Söze?



Best Answer

There aren't any.

In fact the film goes out of its way to make it clear that Verbal is Soze by including:

  1. The scene during the takedown robbery where Dylan hesitates to kill the driver and Verbal does it in cold blood.
  2. The scene on the docks when someone asks what language the crew members are speaking and Verbal answers "Hungarian."
  3. The fact that of all of gang members, only Verbal doesn't "know" who Keyser Soze is and apparently has never heard of him.

A careful review of the film will demonstrate that Verbal is Soze from the beginning and the film throws various MacGuffins in the way to prevent a less discerning viewer from realizing that early on.




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What does the end of usual suspects mean?

Police officer Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) puts all the clues together. He realizes that the mysterious Keyser S\xf6ze is really Keaton. He used the guys to kill the rat who could identify him as S\xf6ze.

What was the point of The Usual Suspects?

A gritty, hard-hitting piece of noir crime cinema, "The Usual Suspects" tells the story of a group of criminals brought together to execute a job that, in turn, gets almost all of them executed.

Did anything in The Usual Suspects actually happen?

It's kind of the point and charm of the film that your narrator is unreliable. All we can know for sure is that a boat was blown up, all of it's passengers were killed and that they were trading people when Keyser Soze was killing many men. Other than that, no other points of the story were qualified as true.

Does Keyser Soze exist?

Keyser S\xf6ze (/\u02c8ka\u026az\u0259r \u02c8so\u028aze\u026a/ KY-z\u0259r SOH-zay) is a fictional character and the main antagonist in the 1995 film The Usual Suspects, written by Christopher McQuarrie and directed by Bryan Singer.



The Usual Suspects - Alternative Ending




More answers regarding alternate conclusions of The Usual Suspects

Answer 2

I have a theory that the real Keyser Soze is none of the five Suspects, but actually Kobayashi (or at least, the person Verbal talks about as Kobayashi and who is played by Pete Postlethwaite).

The main evidence for this is: it's Postlethwaite who picks up Spacey at the very end of the movie.

Now, we only saw this person before in the story woven by Verbal to Kujan, so it's suspicious right from the start, because we don't really know how much of it is true and how much is fabrication. We know that the name Kobayashi is made up, so was there really ever any lawyer who threatened the Suspects to take on the Hungarian boat job? Maybe it was Soze himself?

Verbal (Spacey's character) is just his very trusted accomplice, or "front", to the point where if someone around the world thinks he knows how Soze looks like, they think of Kevin Spacey, not Postlethwaite. The fact that Keaton admits knowing Verbal for several years aids this theory, because would Soze keep appearances as a low level criminal in New York for years?

For me this seems legit because:

  • at the end we see that Kovacs (the burned Hungarian in the hospital) gave a pretty accurate description of Spacey as Soze. Would the real Soze allow such a gaping hole in his plan? Wasn't the whole attack on the boat for the sole purpose of killing the one person who knows how he looks?
  • on the boat we see the that person screaming in horror and identifying Soze before being killed by him (signature two shots in the head). But we don't really see who killed him. And...
  • ...we don't really see who kills all the other Suspects on the boat. We only see their reactions, and still it's all told via unreliable narrator. It might be a non-crippled Verbal, which would prompt some of the reactions (McManus' "Strangest things"), but sudden appearance of a seemingly meek lawyer as a brutal killer would possibly warrant similar reactions.

We don't know if it was Verbal or Kobayashi killing everyone on that boat. Might be both of them, might be just Verbal. Even if it was Verbal who was identified as Soze both by the guy on the boat and the Hungarian in the hospital, this all might be a Prestige-style elaborate ruse to throw off anyone claiming to know how Soze looks by hunting those who only know the false Soze face (i.e. Verbal), just to keep appearances that this is the secret.

This way even with a screw-up like a memory portrait at the end, the world would still have the false face of Keyser Soze.

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