How the X‑Men fran­chise echoes The Usu­al Suspects

It’s regret­table when a promis­ing young direc­tor who made their name with an indie hit becomes part of the stu­dio sys­tem fur­ni­ture. Case in point: Bryan Singer. His 1995 noir thriller, The Usu­al Sus­pects, is a qui­et­ly sub­ver­sive genre mas­ter­piece – a beguil­ing com­bi­na­tion of taut sto­ry­telling and brood­ing atmos­phere. Made on a bud­get of just $6m, the film scooped two Oscars (Christo­pher McQuar­rie for Best Orig­i­nal Screen­play and Kevin Spacey for Best Sup­port­ing Actor) and gave us one of the best plot twists in film history.

In the two decades since its release, Singer has not made any­thing like it. His lat­est film, X‑Men: Apoc­a­lypse, marks his fourth turn at direct­ing Marvel’s mutants, the first arriv­ing in 2000’s fran­chise open­er. Singer’s X‑Men films are gen­er­al­ly well-liked by the fans, but the mixed reviews for Apoc­a­lypse appear to cast Singer as just anoth­er job­bing hack being paid to fill mul­ti­plex­es with sub­stan­dard com­ic book fare. Ear­ly com­par­isons with Bat­man V Super­man have got to hurt.

Yet it’s too sim­plis­tic to accuse Singer of being a stu­dio sell-out who turned his back on a high­er call­ing after The Usu­al Sus­pects. A reassess­ment of that film reveals sev­er­al par­al­lels with the X‑Men fran­chise, hint­ing at how Singer’s most acclaimed work con­tin­ues to influ­ence him today.

First off, The Usu­al Sus­pects is ripe with its own com­ic book mytholo­gies. The film’s pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with coin­ci­dence and fate is root­ed in the con­ceit that five pro­fes­sion­al crim­i­nals are brought togeth­er by mys­te­ri­ous forces. Like the X‑Men, the sus­pects exist in a world of murky moral­i­ty where all sys­tems of author­i­ty – police, politi­cians, judges – appear to con­spire against them. The lurk­ing pres­ence of the seem­ing­ly omni­scient super-vil­lain Keyser Söze could be drawn straight from the pages of a graph­ic novel.

The icon­ic line-up sequence also delin­eates the key char­ac­ters in a man­ner rem­i­nis­cent of a super­hero ensem­ble. Each crook is intro­duced through short inter­ro­ga­tion scenes as Spacey’s voiceover nar­ra­tion describ­ing their respec­tive skills (one is ​“good with explo­sives,” anoth­er ​“a top-notch entry man”). These fixed-per­spec­tive scenes resem­ble com­ic strip pan­els, with the cops’ faces cut from the frame as each sus­pect is cen­tral­ly lit. Singer has com­pared the film’s mood and aes­thet­ic to The Wiz­ard of Oz, and there is cer­tain­ly a dream-like qual­i­ty to some of the imagery that defies stan­dard crime thriller tropes.

The Usu­al Sus­pects also explores the com­bustible nature of male rela­tion­ships in a sim­i­lar fash­ion to the X‑Men series. Women hard­ly fea­ture in The Usu­al Sus­pects, and although there are female char­ac­ters in the X‑Men films, the rela­tion­ships that dri­ve the sto­ry are pri­mar­i­ly between men. In both cas­es women are elu­sive char­ac­ters who cause con­flict or inner tur­moil for their male coun­ter­parts. Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) does this to Wolver­ine (Hugh Jack­man) in X‑Men, while in The Usu­al Sus­pects this role falls to the wife of Gabriel Byrne’s char­ac­ter, who is rarely seen but ref­er­enced frequently.

Singer’s first X‑Men movie remains the best in the fran­chise, and also one of the short­est. With a run­time of 100 min­utes it exhibits the kind of eco­nom­ic, tight­ly-sprung sto­ry­telling seen in The Usu­al Sus­pects, eschew­ing the bag­gy expo­si­tion that bog down lat­er X‑Men instal­ments. It also shares more visu­al cues with the film than any oth­er X‑Men fea­ture, its cli­mat­ic New York har­bour scene evok­ing the piv­otal boat heist in The Usu­al Suspects.

The suc­cess of the X‑Men fran­chise, large­ly under Singer’s stew­ard­ship, has been a key fac­tor in Marvel’s emer­gence as the major cin­e­mat­ic force it is today. Whether or not Apoc­a­lypse proves to be a film too far, the direc­tor would do well to revis­it his pre-com­ic book sal­ad days when con­sid­er­ing which direc­tion to take his career next.