10 Movies That Tried To Subvert Expectations (But Still Sucked)

5. Serenity

Not to be confused with the Firefly movie, Serenity is a mystery-thriller that had some fascinating ideas but totally failed to pull them off. 

The film appears, at first, to be about fisherman Dill (Matthew McConaughey) trying to kill a cruel man named Frank (Jason Clarke), who's abusing his ex-wife (Anne Hathaway) and son Patrick (Rafael Sayegh), but it eventually emerges that these are all characters in a video game created by the real Patrick. In fact, the actual Dill died in Iraq years ago, and Patrick has created the video game as a way of keeping him alive. 

Serenity is a movie with no self-awareness. It telegraphs the big plot twist many times before the actual reveal scene, and it's fatally unaware of just how goofy and icky many of its plot elements are. Viewers are actually meant to take things like Dill talking to a character called The Rules (Jeremy Strong) and obsessively hunting a tuna fish called 'Justice' seriously, and the overall story is so off-putting. 

So, Patrick has created a video game where an Avatar of his father hooks up with an avatar of his mother, does sex work, and then kills an avatar of his stepfather... and at the end, the game gives Patrick the courage to finally kill his stepfather in real life. A young boy murdering a man in cold blood is this movie's idea of a happy ending, apparently. 

Again, no-one could fault Serenity for its ambition, but its execution was abysmally bad.