I love trick endings to films. The perfect trick ending is one like The Sixth Sense or Fight Club, where once you’ve seen the film you can go back and watch for subtle hints early on that slowly reveal what’s really going on. Occasionally, a film comes along that tries such a formula but completely misfires. The trick ending completely undermines everything that’s happened before, and the film collapses in a matter of minutes.
I don’t feel like I need to give this warning given the nature of this post, but WARNING: ENDING SPOILER ALERTS ABOUND! If you haven’t seen the films listed below, don’t bother reading this post, at least until after you’ve watched the films.
Like…
1. Unknown (2011)
Liam Neeson stars as Martin Harris, a doctor who’s in Germany
He eventually does find her at the hotel they were scheduled to stay at, along with another man. This other man happens to be…Martin Harris. And his wife claims she has no idea who he is or why he’s claiming she’s his wife. Now Neeson-Harris has to find out who’s impersonating him, why he’s being impersonated, and find out What’s Really Going On.
The Ending:
Neeson-Harris ultimately finds out he’s an assassin whose target is the colleague headlining the conference. His organization takes out high-priced targets all around the world, and this assassination was designed to look like they were taking out a prince from the Middle East instead of the professor. His cover for this mission was a doctor named Martin Harris so he could infiltrate the conference and take out the professor. Knowing his true nature, he now sets out to stop the assassination.
But, Wait a Minute….
None of this reveal makes the slightest bit of sense. For starters, there’s a scene before Harris learns he’s a trained killer where he confronts his wife in a museum. He demands to know why she’s denying knowing him and figure out what’s going on. She nearly cries and tells him she loves him, but doesn’t explain what her deal is. Before he can get any more information, he has to run away after being spotted by other bad guys.
Think about this scene from her perspective. Her former partner who she’s worked with many times in the past on assassination plots is acting like a complete lunatic, buying his cover as his real identity. He’s bats**t crazy in her eyes, and yet she eggs him on into further thinking there’s a conspiracy around him. Umm…why?
Even more so, once Harris finds out the truth, why does he immediately work on stopping the assassination? Why the sudden strike of conscience? He had no problem carrying out such missions in the past, so whether this professor dies or not shouldn’t bother him at all.
Well, unless the plot needs him to care, which in this case it does.
2. Knowing (2009)
Nicolas Cage, a man who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word “subtle” when it comes to acting, stars as John Koestler, a college professor at MIT whose son stumbles onto a paper buried in a school time capsule for 50 years. The paper is covered in a series of numbers which mean….something.
Koestler eventually figures out the numbers correspond to every disaster on Earth for 50 years, including date, number of casualties, and the exact coordinates of the disaster. He realizes two disasters haven’t yet happened, so he has to act in order to try stopping the last two events from happening.
Too bad the last event involves the destruction of planet Earth.
The Ending:
The short answer: Aliens did it.
Once Koestler realizes Earth is pooch screwed, he takes his son, another woman, and her daughter to figure out a way for them to survive. His efforts lead him to a spot nearby where aliens are gathering a select few humans to take them to another planet and continue the human race.
But the aliens will only take Koestler’s son and the young girl. Daddy can’t come along for the ride to safety. They take the kids away along with the other humans they chose, leaving the rest to die in a fiery blaze.
How humane of them. Pun intended.
But, Wait a Minute…
Just where in f***ing hell did these aliens come from? Why did they only choose a small number of humans to live? What methods did they use to choose which ones lived and which ones got to burn? It’s also clear they knew the Earth was toast all along, so why didn’t they just take everyone to safety? Or better yet, since they have such superior technology, why didn’t they take people away sooner in shifts?
The movie actually did a decent job of building some tension up for the first 100 minutes or so, but the last 15 minutes are so frustratingly awful, they destroy everything that was established earlier in the film. It was like the writers had no idea how to properly end the film, so they plucked the single crappiest ending possible out of thin air.
Oh, speaking of not knowing how to end a film…
3. The Forgotten (2004)
Julianne Moore is Telly Paretta, a woman who keeps griping to her husband and her therapist that she can’t deal with the death of her 9 year old son. Trouble is, both her therapist and her husband think she’s nuts and keep telling her she never had a son. They think she’s dealing with some other kind of trauma where she created the persona of her son in order to deal with it.
Then she meets Ash Correll (Dominic West), a man who might have had a daughter around the same age as Telly’s son. I say might have because he doesn’t remember his own daughter (which says a lot about how much movies value the relationship between a mother and her children versus a father and his kids, but that’s for another time). Eventually the two of them work together on finding their kids and figure out who or what was responsible for erasing their existences.
Before I say anything else, let me say that this plot concept is awesome. It’s the setup for a movie that can really screw with the audience’s collective heads, and when I first saw this film I was genuinely interested in finding out where it was going, because I knew the payoff HAD to be good.
And then…
The Ending:
The short answer: Aliens did it. Again.
The ending involved something about a guy who’s undercover among humans every day looking for new victims for his “employer,” whoever that is, and that part of his job was to erase his victims’ existences completely. He had to wipe out the memories of all family members, friends, coworkers, etc, and - oh, bulls**t, bulls**t, bulls**t, bulls**t, bulls**t, BULLS**T.
But, Wait a Minute…
Did I mention this was an utter bulls**t cop-out of an ending? How in the world did the idea of having aliens kidnap people and erase their existences make sense to the writer and director? They actually had a workable and interesting plot going on for a good hour before they revealed what was going on. When the time came to make the ending, they said, “Ah, f*** it,” and flipped the double middle finger at the audience.
4. Planet of the Apes (2001)
Tim Burton wanted to make his own damn, dirty version of Planet of the Apes, but he was smart enough to know that the original film’s surprise ending wouldn’t work in his remake. The general plot is still the same: Mark Wahlberg is a U.S.
The Ending:
Or is he?
Wahlberg lands on a planet that resembles present day Earth, but he finds himself somewhere in D.C. He finds what should be the Lincoln Memorial, but instead of Honest Abe’s likeness, he finds the likeness of General Thade, the main villain he had fought on the Planet of the Apes, there instead. Then the cops show up in force, and instead of other humans in police uniform, they’re all apes, too.
The end.
But, Wait a Minute…
Huh?
What just happened here? Was Wahlberg thrown forward in time to an Earth where apes ruled? Or was he thrown back in time somehow instead? Or was he thrown into some alternate dimension?
It’s possible that the producers had wanted to make a sequel in order to explain whatever the hell happened in this ending, but since no sequel has ever been made, we’re left to throw our hands in the air and curse Tim Burton’s name.
5. The Book of Eli (2010)
Denzel Washington plays yet another badass who's charged with transporting a book across country through endless miles of desert in a post-apocalyptic Earth. A group of people want to preserve as many written works as possible since they're hard to come by, and whatever book Denzel is carrying is pretty darn important. Meanwhile, Gary Oldman and his cronies want the same book Denzel has for their own monetary gain.
The Ending:
The hardcover Denzel is carrying ultimately ends up in Oldman's possession, but it doesn't matter. The pages in the book are all printed in braille, which makes the book worthless to Oldman..
Oh, the reason the book is in braille? Denzel is blind. And the book itself is a King James Bible. Denzel committed the ENTIRE BIBLE TO HIS MEMORY. When he finally reaches his destination, he recites the Bible verse for verse to a recorder, who then copies everything down for mass production.
But, Wait a Minute....
Have you ever read a book so many times you've been able to recite it word for word to someone else? I don't just mean a Dr. Seuss book. I'm talking about a book that's longer than Stephen King's The Stand. The sheer lunacy of such a man who could memorize the Bible start to finish would be more than enough to call such a twist ending absurd, but then you gotta think about the stuff Denzel does earlier in the film too.
Like get into gun fights. And fist fights. While using a sword.
I know that blind men rely on their other senses, particularly hearing and smell, but seeing Denzel manage to beat up nearly a dozen men in a bar with his sword is ridiculous once you think about the fact that he's blind. And during the climactic shootout with Oldman's goons, he uses a number of firearms to kill off the bad guys. From a good 20 yards away.
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There are plenty more bad twist endings out there, and I'd love to hear what some of yours are. Feel free to share a couple in the comments section.
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There are plenty more bad twist endings out there, and I'd love to hear what some of yours are. Feel free to share a couple in the comments section.
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