10 Recent Movie Twists That Fell Totally Flat

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.