The video cassette is a great leveller. A movie which has impact in the portentous environment of the cinema, even an Odeon, is often revealed upon small-screen playback to be a fake. The experience of watching The Usual Suspects in the moviehouse a couple of years ago was to be seduced into believing that this was a clever, even a profound movie, and the popcorn helped. I now shamefacedly confess to being amongst those who emerged from the picture muttering 'masterpiece' in concert with the generally positive popular and critical response to the film.

However, upon yet another birthday best forgotten, I was the delighted recipient of a video of The Usual Suspects. But my enthusiasm was short-lived. Screened upon my living-room tv-set, where it had to compete with the verisimilitudes of everyday life, even on a birthday, the movie was exposed as infinitely suspect and very usual.

Despite the fanfare upon its initial release, it disappointingly emerged as yet another of those movies which seemed better on the big screen than it actually is. The Usual Suspects, taking its title from yet another famous line from Casablanca, functions upon that old conceit borrowed from both the guilty vicarage whodunit and the hardboiled urban crime story: of the narrative's lead protagonist and de facto storyteller also turning out to be the killer.

Here, however, the film tantalisingly points up the strong possibility that the main character is the villain and engages the audience in the game of trying to prove itself right. The picture brainteases with aplomb, in a maze of guileful twists and turns, at once denying credibility to the consensus conclusion, reaffirming that opinion, rubbishing it once again, then finally confirming it and thereby flattering its audience: flattering audiences being the fool's gold of Hollywood success.

But. The fact is that the mass murderer in this story is very visible from quite an early point in the film, which then proceeds to cover its own entrails with a fair degree of deftness. Despite this, it is difficult to imagine who else the killer could be other than the film's principal character. This is a movie which laughs at its audience, gently chiding it for missing the obvious, whilst inviting it to become interactive. Press the right button at the right plot-point and the window on the world of the movie which then opens up will tell you if you got it right or not.

The film's tension is achieved partly through the creation of mystique: a complex flashback structure and passages of well-written descriptive dialogue evoke the ruthlessly vengeful persona of the centrepiece villain, who becomes an extra mural off-screen presence of intrigue and threat. The unravelling of the killer's heinous history serves to create a disturbingly mythic figure who is, with masterful irony, sitting there before the camera for most of the film. This deviousness is the most successful aspect of the movie, which becomes less of a whodunit than a was-it-him-whodunit? The film manipulates assuredly and with self-amused coyness.

The movie is quite derivative. Its enclosed, claustrophobic, dialogue-laden ethos recalls not only Quentin Tarantino's RESERVOIR DOGS and the Coen Brothers's MILLER'S CROSSING, but also many film noir melodramas of the thirties and forties. Its flashback-driven narrative copycats, without use of a voiceover narrator, Edward Dmytryk's film version of Raymond Chandler's FAREWELL, MY LOVELY (aka MURDER, MY SWEET), and Billy Wilder's DOUBLE INDEMNITY, which he co-scripted with Chandler from the James M Cain novel.

Dmytryk's movie is even aped by THE USUAL SUSPECTS in terms of its master situation. Chandler's famous gumshoe, Philip Marlowe, interrogated by disbelieving cops, retrospectively retells the story of the events which led to his being in police custody, triggering a Chandleresque interior monologue, with its slick metaphors and dark poetry. The voiceover is married to montaged flashbacks which serve to evoke Marlowe's psychological state, as well as describing the violent circumstances of the recent past. Of course, we accept Marlowe's account as the truth, which isn't so in the case of the lead protagonist of THE USUAL SUSPECTS, even though the movie replicates Marlowe's continually knocked-back attempts to convince the law that he is on the level.

THE USUAL SUSPECTS also echoes the creation of mythic characterisation delineated in Chandler's story and in his fiction generally. In FAREWELL, MY LOVELY, Moose Malloy, the simple-minded yet dangerous giant borrowed from John Steinbeck's OFF MICE AND MEN, and Velma, the elusively mysterious femme fatale with whom Moose is naively in love, are ghostily etched night people in Chandler's novel and in the subsequent movie. A similar obliqueness is employed in THE USUAL SUSPECTS to spirit Keyser Soze, the éminence grise of the movie. And THE USUAL SUSPECTS conjures up that forlorn world of noir, with its night streets festooned with drifting fog, the twitching neons, the dark corners and lonely deaths, whilst introducing an intriguingly foreign element, á la THE MALTESE FALCON and, again, CASABLANCA. Murder on a ship also captures the chaos and impermanence of a transient, brutal world, cannily evoked by Peter Postlethwaite's murderously oddball itinerant in a characteristically inventive performance, which threatens to steal the movie from its other stars.

Wilder's DOUBLE INDEMNITY, likewise employing a laconic Chandler interior monologue, gives THE USUAL SUSPECTS its unreliable narrator. Walter Neff's instability, sexual infantilism and fallguy potential are brilliantly deployed in Wilder's film, without ever undermining the concept of hero and audience empathy with him. Yet we are continually aware of Neff's Walter Mitty weakness, self-delusion and the highly coloured shading of viewpoint he places upon the story's events. A similar ambiguity offered by THE USUAL SUSPECTS is far more superficial and by necessity concealed: it is simply reduced to a device to hide the identity of the protagonist, whilst teasing us with the possibility that he is the man.

Yet much of THE USUAL SUSPECTS concerns verification of the truth. What really did happen, how and why. In this sense the film constitutes an investigation into the past and the characters involved in it. A slow moving first half gathers into a gripping narrative, which is gradually unpeeled like the skin of an onion. But its one-dimensional purpose is to divert and amuse, and sustains no thematic properties.

Even so, this reprise of the past does produce its own echoing resonance, reminiscent at times of Alain Resnais's HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR and LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD and, indeed, the whole of Resnais's deeply wrought and impassioned cinema. THE USUAL SUSPECTS focuses upon the need to seek the truth, to confirm the accuracy of events, to establish the validity of impartial record. What really did happen? What is the truth of the past which so overshadows the present?

Resnais's cinema, similarly flashback orientated, denies the reliability of memory, whilst insisting upon the necessity of recall, of recreating the details of the past through remembering it and describing it. Thus HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR is a thriller of the heart, a melodrama of the emotions, in a powerfully compassionate and disturbing unison of image and voice totally unequalled by THE USUAL SUSPECTS, even if the movie similarly evokes a strong Proustian air.

The underworld Pimpernel figure of Keyser Soze is built up as a legendary figure, a sort of criminal Gatsby, a mobster Citizen Kane. A fascinating overlord of skulduggery, a harshly malevolent Prince of Darkness, who brings blight and death. The sense of awe haloing him is produced by the fear he inspires. His name, with its appropriately foreign allusions, tolls throughout the film. His mordant presence haunts every scene in the movie.

Towards the end of the film, at a point when we think his identity is finally about to be revealed, the camera deifies his silhouetted persona by filming him on a tracking shot from a wary distance, moving reverentially across his Napoleonic figure, as the doom-laden music swells on the soundtrack. Keyser Soze becomes an image of dread, the devil himself, a reaper who will gratuitously entrap and destroy, a corrosive manipulator of wintry perspective.

Such is the power of Keyser Soze's mostly unseen persona _ of a beguiling if ruthless tactician and mercilessly wanton killer _ that the resulting enigma restrains any tendency to question why he made the mistake of getting himself arrested in the first place. If the man really is so clever, what is he doing in police custody, albeit cloaked in a different identity? Without this centrepiece of the interrogation there would be no movie, of course, but it is dependent upon audience acceptance of a basic contradiction in Keyser Soze's fastidiously constructed characterisation.

One interpretation serving to justify Keyser Soze's untypical lapse might suggest that he deliberately contrived his own arrest. First, as an elaborate game, playing brutally with Palminterri, another foreign name, this time belonging to the police detective obsessed with locating the true identity of Keyser Soze. And perhaps to clear the name of Verbal, Keyser Soze's surface workaday pseudonym, banishing any suspicion of his culpability by playing the role of a hapless witness with limited information.

This explanation is almost, if not quite, credible. It is certainly fast-footed and needs to be. But the man's presence in police custody unfortunately remains the central flaw of the narrative which is, after all, wholly dependent upon this spinal piece of audience-duping trickery. Therefore reliance upon this duplicity effectively undermines the carefully developed criminal reputation of Keyser Soze. The 'degree of second subtlety,' to quote crime novelist Margery Allingham, involving Keyser Soze in a double indemnity of deceit, isn't quite convincing and his presence there in the precinct seems a strained motivation if it is intended to secure an alibi. Only by a whisker does the movie get away with it because the squat little man, nicknamed Verbal _ a slangy mean streets criminal name offered with delicious irony given Verbal's narrative role and horse's mouth identity _ seems a million miles from Keyser Soze, even as we are cleverly inveigled in trying to confirm our suspicions of Verbal.

But it remains an awkward if a well concealed contradiction in the movie, and points up the problem of the twist-in-the-tale yarn, evidenced in such storytelling from O. Henry's New York short stories to Roald Dahl. In order to create that surprise curtain, just as in the crossword-puzzle guilty vicarage whodunit, there has to be a fair degree of character cheating and credibility bending en route. And the denouement itself _ when the detective notices the similarity between Keyser Soze and Verbal in noticeboard photographs following Verbal's release _ is particularly weak, given the fortuity of the chance recognition. A cop as obsessed as Palminterri would have picked up on this a lot sooner, and not simply through accidental perusal of his noticeboard in the frustrated aftermath of an inconclusive interrogation.

It works negatively in further disabusing us of Keyser Soze's stature, and most certainly concerning Palminterri's investigative abilities. Can a detective who didn't spot this likeness before really be taken seriously? This cop, clearly a pushover, is no competition. And would Keyser Soze risk discovery of himself in this way? Because the turnaround comes at the tail of the film and is presented as an audacious twist, it goes unnoticed. The audience, reaching for its hat, is feeling too smug and pleased with itself to register the fact that it is being conned by Keyser Soze and his creators once again.

As the crippled Kevin Stacey niftily escapes with Postlethwaite, now revealed as Keyser Soze's assistant, can it be said that this arch villain has got away with his evil deeds, and is he really such a mastermind after all? His cover has been blown, his secret orchards located, even if apprehension is now unlikely as the duo hurriedly disappear. A clever conjuring trick, but one which leaves the trickster exposed and less formidable than he at first seemed. And that is a serious shortfall in the film, reducing it to blandly contrived, designer entertainment. The movie's partial failure is the unfortunate consequence of too-clever-by-half thinktank plotting.

These manipulations define the film whilst also seriously limiting it. Like George Orwell's proverbial thin man trying to struggle out of the fat one, this is a fat cat of a movie, dazzling in its firework display of bizarre plot twists, but finally empty and mechanical, a virtuosity which is bereft of any lateral significance or enriching evocation of experience. What the movie does it does competently, but it is simply not enough. It is a shallow movie, and its audience deserves better. Hitchcock at his lightest, say in NORTH BY NORTHWEST, nevertheless provided, underneath the surface, meaning and theme, and still commented upon human mores.

Indeed, it is frequently the less intense pieces of work, enjoying a lightness of touch, which communicate their thematics more accessibly. Graham Greene's 'entertainments,' for instance, more incisively denote his preoccupations than his rather more self-conscious and leaden 'serious' novels. The novelist himself may have preferred the serious ones as more likely to transport him to posterity, and he may have regarded the entertainments as divertissements, pieces of fluff, yet ironically it is the entertainments which get read, speak with greater simplicity and clarity, and are more likely to be the books he will be remembered for.

The English in particular suffer from that cultural snobbery epitomised by G K Chesterton's notorious phrase 'good-bad books,' meaning that if it's fun a piece of work can't be good, however well written or directed it may be. However, in this genre-obsessed age there has been a reawakening to the fact that the greatest of artists, like the intellectually disreputable Shakespeare and Dickens of their time, combine popularity with seriousness, and we no longer have to apologise for valuing the melodramatic.

Yet THE USUAL SUSPECTS shortchanges its audiences in a quite fundamental way. The title itself, although playing upon a double if po-faced irony, is simply a literal transcription of a line of dialogue from CASABLANCA, but the film provides none of the wry flavour which the throwaway remark offered in the original movie. Nor does THE USUAL SUSPECTS sustain any of the passion and downbeat romanticism of its distinguished if overrated forbear. THE USUAL SUSPECTS merely steals the line in self-interested homage in an attempt to instil upon itself some of the Bogart-Bergman magic, yet fails to capture the imagination in the way CASABLANCA still manages.

Its twist-in-the-tail scenario reduces THE USUAL SUSPECTS to a watchable but insubstantial movie, leaving you feeling cheated. Its guessing-game gymnastics eschews any possibility of screen material of greater depth. Maybe candyfloss is all the public wants, and the top-ten charts across the board of medias would seem to confirm this. And, certainly, THE USUAL SUSPECTS is superior to many movies which currently pass for entertainment. Yet experience has proven that audiences tire of the shallow and finally prefer works of greater depth, even if they sometimes remain consciously unaware of those depths, which is why some of the most popular Hollywood directors have also become revered auteurs. They are the artists who know how to gild the pill and give audiences that bittersweet taste.

The basic problem with THE USUAL SUSPECTS is that is postures profundity, but fails to deliver, and is finally nothing more than a smart-alec movie. This constitutes the worst of betrayals by the popular artist, for there is a responsibility on the part of the filmmaker not merely to titillate and rely purely upon gimmickry in their movies. Film is too important a medium for carpetbaggers. Having something to say happens to be a necessity, especially in a film which exhibits such a deeply impressive range of top-grade talent. If the picture wasn't so well made, it would matter less, but in a piece of work put together with such assurance there is a sense of sell-out at its facile content.

Smartness is no substitute for meaning. Were THE USUAL SUSPECTS less accomplished, with average directorial ability, a competent if unexciting screenplay, adequate acting, functional design, and featuring a more predictable storyline, it would still be preferred if it also sustained a voice, a sense of purpose, and if the film meant something beyond filling time. Less well achieved, it would nevertheless remain longer in the memory and continue to haunt the imagination because of filmmaking which recognised that it exists to communicate ideas about ourselves and to reflect upon how we live now. THE USUAL SUSPECTS is a lazy movie, too content with its own complacency.

And there is a way in which a film like THE USUAL SUSPECTS feeds dishonestly upon cinema and cinematic heritage, whilst giving nothing back to it. If RESERVOIR DOGS was a calling-card movie with designer violence spliced in to ensure reputation-building controversy, it also exhibited warm affection for the roots of popular cinema and, in the tradition of Brian De Palma, made no bones about its influences and whom it emulated. It also had edge and sharpness, an aggressive attitude to filmmaking and to life. Whilst paying homage through his copycat cinema, Tarantino also managed, at the same time, to create a piece of work with verve and originality, which offered a freshness of approach. And the enclosed world of the story and its dialogue-led emphasis gave us a filmmaker who was prepared to buck trends and risk the unfashionable, working on the principle that in order to please others you first have to please yourself.

Above all, RESERVOIR DOGS was an angry film, with a dark passion bubbling away under its surface. It may not have been a voice you especially wanted to hear, but it had a strong and virulent tone. The result was a highly impactive piece of personal filmmaking, stamped with originality, Tarantino becoming the best known director with the general public since Hitchcock. And, like Hitch, he has put his own mark on modern cinema.

THE USUAL SUSPECTS inhabits similar territory to RESERVOIR DOGS but, unlike Tarantino's film, fails to break new ground and doesn't exhibit any particular desire to do so. It seems blithely unaware of the need to extend itself, to challenge itself, to embrace greater ambition. The picture rests upon its own self-satisfied laurels. We demand very exacting performances from our filmmakers. They are required to jump higher and higher until they fail, as even Hitchcock finally did. But THE USUAL SUSPECTS doesn't even try: it simply poses, looking good doing so, but providing style without content, virtuosity without innovation, leaving nothing in the end but pastiche. When, with all the resources of talent at its disposal, it could and should have done a lot more.

The ultimate objection to THE USUAL SUSPECTS concerns the nature of the modern thriller. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler drove their mean streets melodramas, without pomposity, to new levels of thematic meaning and social awareness, enabling the perceived potboiler to also be a serious work of art. This major achievement implies that audiences will no longer be content, at least not for long, with the vacuous machinations of the cosy whodunit to which THE USUAL SUSPECTS, by default, finally aligns itself. By trivialising its content for easy and superficial gameplaying, the movie condemns itself and betrays that hard-won opportunity for profundity as well as excitement in the contemporary melodrama.

Unhappily, therefore, THE USUAL SUSPECTS, despite its glittering Jacob's Coat of narrative, only lives up to its borrowed title.

John Foster