THE USUAL SUSPECTS

Here's the honest trade you're being asked to make. Director Bryan Singer and writer Christopher McQuarrie built a crime film that is admired for good reason — intricately plotted, full of entertaining twists and reversals, the kind of movie that rewards a second viewing. That craft is real.

But the cost is steep. Ninety-four obscenities. Twenty-five vulgarities. Four profanities. Lots of shooting. A scene of implied rape. This is a film that entertains some and offends many, by its own reviewer's admission — and the offense here runs deep, not shallow.

The story does have a moral shape: crime pays up front, but sinful lifestyles take their toll. That's a true and biblical idea. It's just buried under so much extreme content that most families, and many adults, will rightly decide the puzzle isn't worth the price of admission.

Off the coast of Southern California, a boat believed to carry $91 million in cocaine explodes in the dead of night. By morning, 27 bodies are found, along with a lot of questions and only two apparent survivors. One survivor tells a hard-nosed U.S. Customs agent how he and four partners — the other "usual suspects" — were manipulated into a job for a crime lord some believe to be the devil himself. The agent doesn't buy it. He suspects the truth is much closer to home.

Three stars means real craft, and this film earns it. It's intricately plotted and stylishly presented, built on entertaining twists and reversals that keep the story moving and the audience guessing. The ensemble of felons and cops is engaging even when it isn't sympathetic — you watch because you want to know, not because you like anyone on screen.

That's the extent of what the source praises: a well-crafted crime film, clever in its construction, effective in its reversals. It doesn't reach four stars, but as pure storytelling mechanics, it works.

This is a humanistic film with some discussion of Christian themes — the crime lord is rumored, in-story, to be Satan himself, which raises the specter of real evil without ever grounding it in a biblical framework. The moral shape of the story isn't "good versus evil" so much as "evil versus itself": felons and corrupt cops alike, circling each other, with no clear righteous side to root for.

What the film does get right is consequence. Crime might pay up front, but these characters' sinful lifestyles cost them far more than a prison term would. That's a truth Scripture affirms plainly: "For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 6:23). The film shows the wages without pointing anywhere toward the gift — which is exactly the gap a Christian viewer should notice.

Craft alone doesn't decide whether a movie earns your evening or your family's screen. This one is genuinely clever — and genuinely soaked in language, violence, and a scene of implied rape that push it well past what most viewers should invite into their home. Our answer stands: skip it. For a better family movie night, see our latest picks.