Probably the most important part of just about any movie is its ending; get it right and you can have a cinematic masterpiece on your hands, but get it wrong and your film might be destined to stew in the mire of DVD bargain bin Hell for all of eternity.
The plot twist is a mainstay of narrative form, an attempt to confound viewer expectation in a way that forces them to re-evaluate the narrative and the characters therein. At its best, it can make a great film better, and at its worst, it can sink even the very best efforts.
These films vary in quality; some are terrible from the outset, some are OK, and some are great, at least until the twist comes along and completely derails things. Some of these instances were clearly directors trying too hard to shock us, and in others, apparently not trying hard enough.
Here are the 10 worst movie plot twists of all time…
10. Tyler Dies In 9/11 – Remember Me
I remember seeing the trailer for Remember Me and thinking that it didn’t look too bad, at least for a film that was clearly exploiting Robert Pattinson’s nascent Twilight fame rather than attempting to challenge him artistically.
For the majority of its run-time Remember Me is a mostly watchable though occasionally overwrought drama, reaching its most misguided moment when we see Tyler (Pattinson) standing in his father’s empty office. Just then, we cut to his young sister at school, and the date is written on the board – “September 11th, 2001″.
Cut back to Tyler, and the camera pans out from the window to reveal that he is in fact inside the World Trade Center, mere moments before the attacks occur. He is killed in 9/11, and this climactic point became a point of contention for critics; was it an audacious way to challenge audiences, or just a tacky way to make a twist out of a national tragedy?
People tended to weigh in on the latter side of the spectrum; after all, Tyler could have been killed by any worldly method, so to piggy-back onto 9/11 to try in an effort to give the film a more emotionally enhanced resonance seems extremely crass. The result is one of the most misguided twists of all time.
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19 Comments
The Village was the beginning of the end for M Night.
Another horrible plot twist is in the original Friday 13th. So this middle aged woman is running around in the middle of the night killing football players? Just stupid.
Remember Me has showed reality of this event,seems many people can’t stand that ”this vampire from Twilight”dared to be 9/11 victim and make money from ”national tragedy”,yaeh,right.I bet if R.Gosling would have played Tyler,everybody would say how brave he was for taking such challenging role.
Wrong. It’s not bad just because it has 9/11 in it. It’s bad because 9/11 is just tacked on as some kind of extra plead for emotion. It doesn’t have anything to say about 9/11 or the victims, nor does it offer any kind of insight about it. It doesn’t even use it as a backdrop in anyway. He could have just as easily died from a baseball to the temple, or a piano falling on him. It has 0 impact on the rest of the story. Zero. Terrible “twist.” (Although I wouldn’t call it a twist, just a surprise ending.)
This movie showed in the best possible way ”construction” of this event;Tyler’s death was surprise just like in reality 9/11 was.It says that victims had a normal life,they were sons or daughters,fathers or mothers.Tyler’s life is a story of this movie,life that ended in horrible way,he just went to meet with his father and never came back.Of course he could have died for example for a cancer,but it would have been another story for a different movie.It was movie about 9/11 victim, that we found out at the end of the film.His death has impact on his family:his father focus on his daughter,the only child he has,and it’s also a story for another movie.
Asurprise ending is a sterile woman getting pregnant, a twist is a black baby born to a white couple.
i always though the twist in the village was brilliant (if you ignore the lack of aircraft and modern noises) send the blind kid to get the medicine, she’ll never see the modern world so can’t report back. the moment she climbed the fence and landed on a road was a moment to think wow.
the number 23 also i thought was a great twist. all the way through you’ve Carey’s character, imagining himself as the detective in the book he’s reading, to then find out it was actually him all along, both in writing the book and being in the book. the realisation that the book is a manifestation of his subconcious guilt in a way.
each to their own though i suppose
At the end of “The Village” I started wondering how the founders, only a short generation from the real world, were using archaic forms of speech like “thy” and “thou.” Laughably dumb.
Totally agree with including Remember Me, cheap ploy at a tear-jerker ending using a national tragedy. Awful stuff.
In the The Life of David Gale Spacey’s character and the woman have consensual sex the night before she kills herself.
Planet of the Apes suffered from Tim Burton’s need to reimagine things. He always swears he’s going to produce something “closer to the source material” but it never works out that way. He should just say “I’mma Burtonize this beast. Expect tons of stripes and my wife.” At least that would be more on point than whipping out an unexplained Monkey Lincoln.
I loved high tension but the plot twist at the end really makes you wonder how the hell the oral sex scene in the van between the “fat man” and the decapitated head at the start of the movie actually could have happened.
It didn’t. At least not in the way we were shown. That’s what I loved about it. We’re told a story from the viewpoint of an unreliable source. As far as twists go, I thought it was brilliant. Also, a woman can get oral from a severed head. Anyone who’s seen Re-Animator could tell you that.
The worst plot twists I can think of include: “Hide and Seek” where Dakota Fanning’s imaginary friend who was stalking her was actually Robert De Niro’s murderous alternate personality! And the other is “Perfect Stranger” where Halle Berry is the murderer all along instead of Bruce Willis or any other person.
agreed.
Nice list shaun. Please do a list on the best twists, so we can talk about repomen.
Oh did I hat The Number 23… I wanted to like it… An hour in I was ready to leave but I thought… {Maybe it’ll redeem all these bade scenes) No… It got worse… It really tries to be smarter than it is and doesn’t make any sense as far as any of the characters motivations for writing/publishing the book… The worst though was how willing the father and son were to buy into the whole “the book is about me!” thing… His wife makes a very compelling argument for a minute on why they are talking out of their asses and as a middle-finger to the audience the two guys just shrug it off and eventually convince the wife… Just poorly written characters and motivations in order to create a movie with a half-ass plot twist…
Safe Haven is a worthy number one pick. AWFUL!
I Like The Village and I like negative articles.
How about ‘The Book of Eli’? Turns out Denzel was blind the whole time and shooting and fighting guys from hearing their movements. Plus the fact that THE BIBLE is the most important document that everyone is trying to claim. Worst. Film. (Twist). Ever.