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Films Ruined By Their Endings

Started by AsparagusTrevor, October 24, 2010, 12:49:36 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Pepotamo1985

Quote from: Serge on November 09, 2010, 11:05:06 PM
Funnily enough, I like the ending of 'Unbreakable', because it's the only one of Shyamalan's twist endings that I didn't guess before I saw the film!

I'd go as far as saying that's one of the few film twists I didn't see coming in general. Then again I saw it when I was 12, but it was legitimately surprising, and the film was the right degree of ridiculous that I happily swallowed it.

If I watched it now, I'd probably think it was really shit.

EDIT: Well, that was worth a new page wasn't it.

Famous Mortimer

Quote from: Tiny Poster on November 15, 2010, 07:43:41 PM
BJM has one of my favourite endings! More haunting than any horror.
I just don't think the person that Cusack is comes close to warranting that sort of an ending, though.

I totally understand what Benjie Trufflesnort is saying, and even probably agree with it. But still, it's a punishment which way outstrips the crime, and thus I find it ruined (see also: Drag Me To Hell).

Mister Six

Quote from: Big Jack McBastard on November 05, 2010, 04:57:59 PMConstatine should have been smoking at the end, fucking chewing gum.

Pah! The film was already ruined by a magical shotgun, fucking holy knuckledusters, a 12-year-old 'Chaz', tiresome Catholic theology, Keanu's charisma-free performance and a plot that made no sense (angels and devils cannot walk upon the Earth! Er, except for the ones played by Peter Stormare and Tilda Swinton[nb]Reeves aside, that was a fucking good cast. Those two plus Honsou and Weisz? Excellent stuff. I actually quite like The Beef as well, but he shouldn't be playing a 50-year-old bruiser of a taxi driver...[/nb]. And how do half-breed angels and demons come into being if their parents can't come to Earth to mate? Absolute tosh).

I'd love to see a proper, UK-shot Hellblazer TV show. Something with the look of those Whitechapel crime dramas would go down a treat.

Small Man Big Horse

I just watched Megamind and thought it was fun in a throwaway kind of manner, but the bit
Spoiler alert
at the end where they all start dancing to Bad
[close]
left a nasty taste in my mouth.

HappyTree


Cool Runnings was ruined when the bobsleigh team of Jamaica lost at the end. I am aware that this is what happened in real life but in the film I expected them to right the wrong. Having said this the ending where they carry the
Spoiler alert
bobsled
[close]
down the chute is
Spoiler alert
both inspiring and touching
[close]
.

jaydee81

No mention of Adaptation? The first two acts are probably my favourite hour and a bit of cinema ever. Then it all goes a bit (intentionally) shit.

Johnny Townmouse

#67
The Orphanage

I think for me this is the greatest and most steep fall from grace. The film is an atmospheric tour-de-force, never holding back from being grim and utterly fucking terrifying. The séance scene leaves a right full-on turin shroud in the britches.

Then the ending
Spoiler alert
goes all hollywood, with a scene of all the screaming kids all happy
[close]
and shit. It has an
Spoiler alert
ascension narrative
[close]
which I always find utterly appalling. Very good, quite good and mediocre films often have awful endings. But this is a perfect film utterly shot through with a totally gash ending.


Phil_A

Yeah, that's kind of the same problem I had with The Orphanage, it just didn't know when to stop. Every time it seemed to be heading towards a point where it could've ended satisfactorally, it just kept on going.

I still think it's a great film, though.

CollaterlySisters

Oscar & Lucinda. Which is faithful to the book until the last sentence! They wreck the narrative & implausibly Hollywoodize it. If you can't be arsed with either book or film, read the last sentence in your local Waterstones' copy, then guess what they changed: I bet you can.

tygerbug

QuoteNo mention of Adaptation? The first two acts are probably my favourite hour and a bit of cinema ever. Then it all goes a bit (intentionally) shit.


Yeah, that killed me in theaters; I was really unhappy with how clunky and poorly done the entire third act was. The first two acts are absolutely brilliant, and capture the creative process of screenwriting better than any film has. Then it just all goes completely leaden just to make a point about Hollywood screenwriting. They simply don't pull off what they're trying to do.

It's interesting to think that Charlie Kaufman's Being John Malkovich, as a script, had a completely different third act, involving The Devil and Hell. It went in such a wildly different direction that they all decided to have Charlie rewrite it, based more on what had happened in the first two acts. The same would have helped Adaptation a lot.

It might have worked on the page, I suppose. It's incredibly hard to make a sarcastic film. Movies only work when they're genuine, and trying to make something purposely bad tends to come off as ridiculous and reductive, as there isn't the care and attention put into the piece that any genuine film would have, even one you don't admire - unless it's pushed all the way to become a wacky over the top spoof. And even then, really. (Pumpkin, with Christina Ricci, was a sarcastic film, and thus was hard to get a read on. Interesting, but more as a curio.)

Harpo Speaks

Quote from: jaydee81 on February 24, 2011, 05:23:30 PM
No mention of Adaptation? The first two acts are probably my favourite hour and a bit of cinema ever. Then it all goes a bit (intentionally) shit.

I'm with you on that. It's obvious what he's trying to do, but it doesn't work and it's a shame as I was really enjoying it up to that point.

jaydee81

I remember reading an interview with Robert McKee somewhere where they said 'so you were in Adaptation, that must've been pretty weird' expecting him to say 'yeah, blah blah blah it was fun' but his reply was 'look I told Charlie when they started shooting that the third act resolution was a cop out and not very good.'
I don't really see why he had to ignore McKee and 'cheat' the end, even though it did say so much about his character.
And I would go as far as saying the first hour is cinematic perfection. Synecdoche New York was such a great film, with a great start, middle and end, but I always feel as if it was lacking something that Adaptation had. Heart, maybe.
Then again, maybe Adaptation should be filed into the thread of 'things that are so amazing, that as you are experiencing them you know your expectations are so heightened that anything that concludes it will feel a bit like a cop out.'

HappyTree

The drunken superhero film Hancock starring Will Smith had promise, but then a plot twist 2/3 of the way through made it go crazy and very poor.

AsparagusTrevor

Aye aye, gotta agree with that. The ending especially was just all over the place.

tygerbug

  Synecdoche, New York was very interesting, but lacked visual appeal and appeal in general - there's no sense of fun to it and it's a bit dreary, if sometimes transcendently clever. It's a bit detached. It's all right, better than some of Kaufman's other works like Human Nature, but it doesn't reach the heights of Eternal Sunshine, which was more emotional.

Canted_Angle

Every Coen Brothers movie feels unfinished and the only time it really works is in Burn After Reading.

Hot Pants


holyzombiejesus

Breaking The Waves. I can't actually remember the ending but I do recall me and my girlfriend at the time bursting out laughing.

defmem

Unbreakable. Watched it for the first time last night after my lady consistently badgering me to watch it for weeks. Although I didn't think it was especially brilliant, it was good and had some surprisingly tense moments, but the captions at the end pissed me off. I thought it was a wonderfully bleak ending with Willis leaving the shop horrified and Jackson's grief-stricken last line.

But oh well, he ended up in an asylum. Great.

I would bet real, no foolin' money that Shyamalan had planned from the outset for a sequel, only to be told no at the last minute, and in a panic he tacked on the 'what happened after' notes to give the film closure. Or he's just shit.

Blank_Frackis

In general, I think there are a lot of fairly bad films ruined by their endings. The sci-fi/mystery genre is good at this. Even if you know a film is going to be rubbish you can still occasionally get drawn in by an idea - how can a girl go missing on a plane? (Flightplan) Nicolas Cage has a bit of paper that predicts future disasters, what's that all about? (Knowing) Then the explanation comes along and it's a pile of implausible nonsense that usually involves people running around with guns - which is why Adaptation's ending worked in my opinion.

Phil_A

Limitless. What the hell were they thinking there? The final scene basically just completely undermines any kind of worthwhile point the film was trying to make. It manages to sidestep all the moral issues it raises with an unbelievable happy ending that seems to be implying it's actually okay to use drugs to cheat your way to power and success, as long as you're clever enough to keep your hands clean and not get fingered for any of the bad things you may've done on the way there.

The odd thing about it is that the main character is set up for a massive fall from the point where
Spoiler alert
he makes off with his murdered brother-in-law's stash, but it just doesn't happen. He keeps on making the kind of bad choices which should end him up right in the shit, but everything he does he gets away with. It's made clear all the way through that there are terrible consequences to taking this drug, starting with headaches and blackouts and ending in decrepitude and premature death. But by the time it gets to the "Twelve Months Later" ending, he's managed to avoid every one of them. In fact there's absolutely no consequence to any of the things he did. He has literally got away with murder. Oh, and he gets his girlfriend back even though she'd previously said she wanted nothing more to do with him if he was going to keep taking the drug. Just don't ask what happened to his ex-wife. Or the woman he may've murdered in a hotel room(a plot point which is strangely never addressed).
[close]
.

wearyworld

Quote from: jaydee81 on February 25, 2011, 09:42:10 PM
I remember reading an interview with Robert McKee somewhere where they said 'so you were in Adaptation, that must've been pretty weird' expecting him to say 'yeah, blah blah blah it was fun' but his reply was 'look I told Charlie when they started shooting that the third act resolution was a cop out and not very good.'
I don't really see why he had to ignore McKee and 'cheat' the end, even though it did say so much about his character.
That's pretty different to this interview:

Quote from: Robert McKeeI called Ed back and I said, "If we have fun then I'll play his villain for him, but [...] the third act sucks and I can't be a character in a bad movie. [...]" And so they agreed to all of that and so we had many, many meetings over the act three problems until it got to a point where I would finally agree.  And then of course, my redeeming scene in the bar, which becomes a pivotal scene, I think Charlie understood from that scene that even McKee couldn't help him.  And that's why Donald writes Act 3.  And if you watch the film carefully you'll realize that Charlie's character only writes the first two acts and then he brings in Donald from Hollywood and Act 3 is Donald's version of an Act 3.

I love Adaptation, and its embrace of Act 3 failure is both honest and moving. He certainly doesn't 'cheat' – the McKee of the film would have much more of a problem with the first two acts. If anything Kaufman's asking how to make truthful art and whether it can ever 'succeed.'

SavageHedgehog

Quote from: Phil_A on March 23, 2011, 05:17:33 PM
Limitless. What the hell were they thinking there? The final scene basically just completely undermines any kind of worthwhile point the film was trying to make. It manages to sidestep all the moral issues it raises with an unbelievable happy ending that seems to be implying it's actually okay to use drugs to cheat your way to power and success, as long as you're clever enough to keep your hands clean and not get fingered for any of the bad things you may've done on the way there.

The odd thing about it is that the main character is set up for a massive fall from the point where
Spoiler alert
he makes off with his murdered brother-in-law's stash, but it just doesn't happen. He keeps on making the kind of bad choices which should end him up right in the shit, but everything he does he gets away with. It's made clear all the way through that there are terrible consequences to taking this drug, starting with headaches and blackouts and ending in decrepitude and premature death. But by the time it gets to the "Twelve Months Later" ending, he's managed to avoid every one of them. In fact there's absolutely no consequence to any of the things he did. He has literally got away with murder. Oh, and he gets his girlfriend back even though she'd previously said she wanted nothing more to do with him if he was going to keep taking the drug. Just don't ask what happened to his ex-wife. Or the woman he may've murdered in a hotel room(a plot point which is strangely never addressed).
[close]

I'm not sure
Spoiler alert
it's ever established that he definitely murdered that woman
[close]
. The ending is strange though, but to be honest most of the film felt like a bit of a missed opportunity, if a mildly entertaining one.

Marv Orange

Quote from: SavageHedgehog on March 27, 2011, 09:12:10 PM
I'm not sure
Spoiler alert
it's ever established that he definitely murdered that woman
[close]
. The ending is strange though, but to be honest most of the film felt like a bit of a missed opportunity, if a mildly entertaining one.

I've got it in to my head
Spoiler alert
that the murder was Atwoods NZT fuelled plan doing to get his hands on the pills by using the lawyer (it doesnt quite scan as surely Atwoods driver would have known about the plan. If he was the one who committed the murder  why he is surprised to find out the lawyer has the pills)
[close]

izzy

The ending of They was really bad. The movie itself was kind of ridiculous. There's an alternative ending on the DVD which is far superior to the actual ending. Oh well.

Doomy Dwyer

'Once Upon a Time in America' is long overdue a re-edit, the film's been butchered to buggery. There are some beautiful sequences in it, but it's all over the shop in its current form. Apparently Leone originally envisioned it as a film in two parts, there's about six to ten hours of footage available that could presumably be shunted around into something like the original version that Sergio had in mind. As it is, it's a mess, the ending in particular, one of the great 'What the fuck just happened there?' moments of cinema, but not in a good way. The film sort of works if you look at it as an opium induced reverie, but it could be so much more. It'd be nice to see De Niro in something decent again too. What's this new piece of shit I'm seeing posters for where he looks like your fucking dad? You're Robert De Niro, man, smarten yourself up for fucks sake.

So it's not so much ruined by its ending as ruined by a lot of factors. But the ending is shit, nevertheless.


SteveDave

Quote from: izzy on March 28, 2011, 10:39:00 AM
The ending of They was really bad. The movie itself was kind of ridiculous. There's an alternative ending on the DVD which is far superior to the actual ending. Oh well.

Is that the French (I think) Ils? Or is there another They?

Anyway I nominate "Ils". Unbelievably scary until they get into the drains like Tom Fun & Derek.

phantom_power

up in the air is an enjoyable film ruined by a massive shrug of an ending

holyzombiejesus

Quote from: SteveDave on March 29, 2011, 10:12:21 PM

Anyway I nominate "Ils". Unbelievably scary until they get into the drains like Tom Fun & Derek.

Hahaha!!!