A massive explosion rips through a ship in a San Pedro, CA, harbor, leaving 27 men dead, and 91 million dollars' worth of cocaine, believed to be on board, mysteriously missing. The only survivors are a severely burned and very scared Hungarian terrorist, and “Verbal” Kint (Kevin Spacey), a crippled con-man.

Near the end of the film, Kint, says, "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." This may be the key line in this story; the farther along the movie goes, the more one realizes that not everything is quite what it seems, and what began as a conventional whodunit turns into something quite different.

Police detective Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) brings in the main suspect, Verbal Kint, for questioning. Kint's nickname stems from his inability to keep his mouth shut, and he recounts the events that led to the disaster in great detail. Events which revolve around a heist orchestrated by Keiser Soze, a criminal mastermind whose violent reputation is so infamous that he's said to have responded to a threat to murder his family by killing them himself, just to prove that he feared no one.

"I was attracted to The Usual Suspects because of its director [Bryan Singer], its writer [Christopher Mcquarrie], and because so many things that that movie said to me were beneath the surface. It's a great thriller or mystery, but on another level it's a film about the fact that, if you only look at a person through one lens, or only believe what you're told, you can often miss the truth that is staring you in the face." -- Kevin Spacey, Interview Magazine, February 1997.