tjowen

The Usual Suspects is two movies in one. Enjoyable the first time you watch it, even more enjoyable the second time round. The first viewing asks questions that are answered in an `I could kick myself' moment in the final few minutes, and the second viewing is interesting because when you know the answers, the film becomes that much clearer. It requires a certain amount of commitment, though. Be warned, if you stop concentrating for a moment then the remaining running time of the movie will be spent trying to figure out how what you missed has lead to what you are now watching.

It concerns the story of five felons brought in by the police for a line-up and how those same felons reluctantly end up working for the mysterious and ghost-like Keyser Soze: a legend among the criminal fraternity, a man who no-one has seen and lived, a man so dangerous that he is thought to be the devil himself.you get the idea. The plot is rather intricate so I shan't bother to explain it here but it does rather make me think that Christopher McQuarrie, the writer, kept going to the office in the morning with yet another complexity to add that he thought up the night before. That's not to say it doesn't work, far from it, but it does leave you reeling from the sheer amount of information and names thrown at you from the offset.

Gabriel Byrne is good, but not flawless, as the tortured Dean Keaton who is torn between his career as a criminal and his forlorn attempt at trying to go straight, but his relationship with uptown lawyer Edie Finneran (Suzy Amis) is badly explored and I never felt it gave motive enough for his actions throughout the movie. Kevin Spacey is wonderful as the crippled Roger 'Verbal' Kint and is effective with the results both cunning and tragic. The real star of the movie, however, is a strangely accented Pete Postlethwaite as Kobayashi, supposedly Keyser Soze's right-hand man. He effortlessly plays a character of terrible coolness and poker-faced efficiency leading the dance that the rest of the characters must follow.

Director Bryan Singer has done well to bring such a momentous and involved screenplay to life and any gripes I may have cannot detract from the fact that the film, as a whole, is much better than the sum of its parts.

I first saw The Bounty many years ago late at night while trying to find something decent on television and I couldn't have asked for a better result, rarely has channel hopping proved so prosperous. Years later, when I got hold of the video, the film had lost none of its' wonder. I wasn't lucky enough to catch it on a cinema screen and often wonder how it would compare, but it remains terribly powerful on the small screen - an achievement few movies can lay claim to.

The Bounty set sail in 1788 to transport breadfruit from Tahiti to the West Indies as a cheap source of food for slaves but after a paradisiacal spell on the island (with an abundant sexual promiscuity from the Tahitian women), the sailors mutinied shortly after leaving the island. Due to reasons that become clear throughout the course of the film, the episode has remained one of the most documented and talked about in maritime history and the movie does well to live up to legend.

Most time is spent examining the relationship between Lieutenant William Bligh (Anthony Hopkins) and Masters Mate Fletcher Christian (Mel Gibson) who had been friends for many years before setting sail, but whose friendship becomes tested after a clash of interests while harboured in Tahiti. It is this relationship that drives the movie onwards. In many accounts William Bligh has been painted as a bad tempered megalomaniac and Fletcher Christian as a courageous man driven to the edge, however the writers, Richard Hough and Robert Bolt, are careful to keep this relationship so well balanced that your sympathies sway between both points of view for the duration of the movie. Though the crux of the film lies in this association, all too brief moments explain the feelings of the rest of the crew and I would have liked to see more made of the thoughts of the films largest cast, the Tahitians.

With actors ranging from Dexter Fletcher to Laurence Olivier, and Daniel Day-Lewis to Liam Neeson the casting (as in many British movies) is second to none. Even the unknown Tahitian actors, such as Wi Kuki Kaa as King Tynah, carry off their roles with well-observed sensitivity and an understanding of the structure of the story.

Roger Donaldson directs with aplomb and brilliantly captures the claustrophobia of the ship and the situation while maintaining the expanse of the ocean and the Tahitian landscape. Though the film rightly focuses on the story of the mutiny itself, and the events leading to it, some of the most interesting parts of the true story have been sorely missed or skated over. I wont go into these events here (to save giving the story away), but if you liked the film it's worth reading much of the literature that has been written about The Bounty to get the complete and fascinating account.