Many of you young ones may not remember this, but there was a time when every other film in Hollywood didn't have a twist ending. There are few things more exciting in film than a well executed twist, as it not only turns your predictions and expectations of a film upside down, but wraps up open questions and unexplained portions of a film in the blink of an eye. Extremely well done twists have the added bonus of making you want to watch a film a second time to see it in a new light, like in films such as The Prestige, The Sixth Sense, Psycho, and Fight Club. But despite all these great examples, the best twist I can think of in a film comes from the Bryan Singer independent film The Usual Suspects.
20 YEAR OLD SPOILER INCOMING!
Everything in this film so far has led up to Keaton being the mastermind of the entire operation and the alter-ego of infamous crime lord Keyser Soze. The entire film has revolved around revealing this mysterious man's true identity, and when Baer explains that Keaton has done this trick before when he left the police force it seems like it's only natural that he pull the same trick twice. This goes hand in hand with the earlier (and now legendary quote) "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist".
But then, out of the BLUE, we get this scene that totally changes our perception of what we have been seeing. It's an absolutely brilliant scene of storytelling and revelation, and while there maybe better twists in film (heck, even The Sixth Sense), you would be hard pressed to find a better filmed twist. It's so basically shot that it's brilliance in its' simplicity, and it allows the revelation to come to the viewer without cramming it in their face ad nauseam. The simple score underlying Verbal subtly losing his limp in the street is almost a textbook example of proper framing combined with a fitting score, and the slow coffee mug drop is still five of my favorite seconds in film for this same reason.
My one complaint with the scene (if you could call it a complaint) is that the addition of the overlying dialogue almost spells it out a little too much for the audience. It isn't nearly as irritating as the "micro-flashbacks" that accompany most flashbacks in film these days (Sixth Sense's twist is pretty awful in this regard), but it still detracts from the scene being even more quietly resounding. It reminds me of when they made Alex Proyas add that scene at the beginning of Dark City that completely explains the answer to who The Strangers are in the film, and I wonder if maybe there is an edit out there of this scene without the dubbed over lines. Regardless of this small problem though, this scene is still a masterpiece, and stands out as the coup de grace in a nearly flawless crime drama.
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