10 Recent Movies Ruined By Their Third Act
Longlegs' ending couldn't match the film's blistering opening act.
Making any movie is really, really hard, but making a movie that actually delivers a satisfying ending and sends audiences home happy? It's perhaps the hardest part of the entire filmmaking process.
And so it's little surprise that so many movies struggle to stick the landing with a third act that pays off everything leading up to it. And where recent movies are concerned, none have struggled quite as much as this lot.
While not all of these movies were great, they all at least had promise to turn in a final reel which left audiences on a gratified high.
But that sadly wasn't to be, as in each case the third act was clearly the worst part, ensuring that on-the-fence viewers likely came away with a mixed-to-negative opinion of the movie as a whole.
Perhaps these films fumbled a big climactic plot twist, struggled to achieve the emotion they were clearly angling for, or were almost certainly cut to ribbons in post-production by the scissor-happy studio.
Does it mean these films aren't worth watching at all? Not necessarily, but buyer beware - they all ended up saving the worst for last...
10. The Creator
Gareth Edwards' The Creator is nothing if not an impressive audio-visual spectacle, even if Edwards' writing clearly can't match his technical skill as a filmmaker.
And this becomes most apparent in the movie's chaotic, sloppy finale, which strains to cram a whole hell of a lot into less than 30 minutes of screen time.
Protagonist Sgt. Taylor (John David Washington) learns that his wife Maya (Gemma Chan) is comatose and AI simulant Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) was modelled after their unborn daughter - revelations we're barely able to linger on before Taylor heads off on the climactic mission to destroy space station NOMAD.
Predictably it culminates in Taylor making a cliched heroic sacrifice, and the film hurriedly cuts to credits barely a minute later, ensuring we've got almost no time at all to sit with what we just witnessed.
Edwards clearly has a fantastic eye for visuals, but The Creator desperately needed a more finessed writer who would let the impactful moments breathe and not make the final stretch feel so breathlessly perfunctory.