10 Recent Movie Twists That Fell Totally Flat
George Clooney's Batman left fans more confused than amused.
When they work, plot twists can elevate a good movie to greatness, leaving audiences genuinely surprised and eager to rewatch the film with new information in mind.
But when filmmakers get them wrong, they can ruin a whole damn movie, or even make a mediocre one damn-near unwatchable.
Basically, if you're going to deploy a game-changing twist in your film, you need to be really sure that it makes sense within the established logic of the story's world, and that it's not so blindingly obvious that viewers roll their eyes when the penny finally drops.
These 10 recent movies, for one reason or another, just didn't get it right, ensuring these "shock" reveals all landed with a damp thud.
Perhaps the twists were just too predictable, were motivated by cynical behind-the-scenes reasons, betrayed everything leading up to it, or left audiences unintentionally laughing their asses off.
Whatever the cause, these plot twists all fell totally flat, ensuring everyone wondered quite what those involved were thinking. How these twists made it through the script approval process and into major released movies is anyone's guess...
10. Barney Faked His Own Death - Expend4bles
There's somehow one thing worse than the utterly appalling visual effects throughout the fourth Expendables movie - that groan-worthy plot twist.
In the film's first major action sequence, Expendables leader Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone) is seemingly killed by villain Rahmat (Iko Uwais), who shoots the heroes' plane down, leading Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) to discover Ross' smouldering corpse amid the flaming wreckage.
Christmas spends the rest of the film avenging Barney's death, but during the final confrontation with terrorist Ocelot (Andy García), Ocelot is suddenly mowed down by Ross, who re-appears in a chopper, revealing that he faked his death the whole damn time.
It's an embarrassingly lame twist which was seemingly engineered solely to give Sylvester Stallone a reason to sit out most of the movie without killing him off for real, given that his screen time ends up totalling around 15 minutes, apparently due to creative differences with producers.
And beyond that, it's also revealed that Ross faked his death by switching places with a minor comic relief character, Jumbo Shrimp (Mike Moller), who didn't seem even remotely worthy of effectively being murdered by Ross. What a hero.
It's probably fitting that such a low-effort sequel comes complete with such a lousy, deeply inane twist.