10 Ridiculous Movie Premises Everybody Fell For
1. We Know Who Keyser Soze Is - The Usual Suspects (1995)
*deep breath* Here we go.
The underlying premise of The Usual Suspects is that Roger 'Verbal' Kint (the crippled conman that narrates the majority of the movie in flashback form as an informal statement to police) is actually Keyser Soze, a shadowy crime lord who's kept himself so deep underground that his fellow criminals think he's a spook story, and the police think he's an urban myth. Soze finds that there's still a man in the old country that can identify him. Trusting no one else to do the job for him, Soze comes out of the shadows one final time, assembling a team of hardened criminals under false pretences to get him in where he needs to be so that he can take out the snitch himself.
Then, like that - *poof* - he's gone... except he's not, is he? He's picked up by the police with a firearm before he can make his escape, is arrested, interrogated and charged.
However: if Keyser Soze is so secretive, such a mysterious, enigmatic figure, then why is it that he allowed himself to be taken in with a weapon that would give them reason to hold him? Why allow himself to be interrogated by the law and give a statement? Why not just flee the scene and disappear? A master manipulator like that doesn't insert himself into a situation like that without a getaway plan, and even if he can't get off the docks in time, he can certainly dispose of the gun. All the police know about the background to the events on the docks comes from the statement given by Kint: without that, they have a burning boat, twenty-seven dead bodies and a half-dead Hungarian witness, Arkosh Kovash, in the hospital.
If Kint is Keyser Soze himself, then there's no reason to stick around to be caught - it's too great a risk. But is he? After all, we only think he is because the Hungarian says that Keyser Soze was there, "killing many people", and supplied a description of the man he saw. We assume the picture that comes over the fax in the last minute of the film is a representation of Keyser Soze himself. However, Arkosh Kovash doesn't know what Keyser Soze looks like: he's assuming that the person he saw was Keyser Soze, because Keyser Soze is the Devil himself, the underworld boogeyman they were plotting against. As far as Arkosh Kovash is concerned, they were trying to shoot the Devil in the back... and they missed.
What we know for sure is that crippled conman 'Verbal' Kint is a well-established cover, worn by a canny, experienced operator. We know that the deal being done at the docks was for information that would allegedly identify Keyser Soze. We know that the man calling himself Kint was at the docks when the ship exploded, to be identified as present by Kovash and to have been picked up with a serious firearm by police. We know that large portions of his statement to police are probably lies: certainly large portions of the information given to customs agent Dave Kujan are definitely fiction. We know that massive political pressure is brought to bear to have 'Kint' released ASAP, and that upon his release he abandons the Kint identity and is picked up on the street and driven away. The only explanation that fits all of what we know is that the man calling himself 'Verbal' Kint isnt actually Keyser Soze, but works for him at a high level, and assisted in arranging the massacre at the docks in order to take out the snitch who could identify his boss.
It's only Keyser Sozes own mythmaking that says that the Devil himself would come out of hiding to kill the one man who knew what he looked like. How does that actually make sense? Think about it, really. Risking identification in order to avoid risking identification? 'Kint' allowed himself to be caught: he knew very well that his boss could get him out any time he liked, and that his Verbal Kint cover wasn't going to be useful after this, so the weapons charge and the interrogation weren't a problem for him. All he needed to do was set up a plausible story to hang on the massacre at the docks.
Thanks to Kujan's bull-in-a-china-shop routine, the man posing as Verbal delivered his statement without challenge and made it out of the precinct. After that, my guess is they'll never hear from him again.