10 Teased Movie Endings That Frustratingly Never Happened
4. Clyde Wins - Law Abiding Citizen
Law Abiding Citizen is a quintessential guilty pleasure movie, a ludicrously entertaining thriller in which Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) seeks revenge against the men who killed his family, and also the corrupt, ineffective criminal justice system that proved so lenient towards the perpetrators.
The entire tone of the film is glorious schlock, with the audience encouraged to root for Shelton as he goes from mild-mannered everyman to criminal mastermind, cooking up elaborate, Saw-esque ways to murder both the killers and the various employees of a legal system build on plea bargains and half-baked ideas of justice.
But the film ruins the fun in the final 10 minutes, when Jamie Foxx's thoroughly unlikeable lawyer character gets the better of Shelton, taking the bomb Shelton planned to detonate in City Hall and placing it in Shelton's own cell, killing him moments later.
Though Butler's scenery-chewing amusement at having the tables turned on him sure is fun to watch, it felt like a massive tonal miscalculation to kill the very character the audience increasingly got behind over the course of the movie - no matter the extremity of his actions.
Rumour has endured ever since the film's release that Foxx insisted the ending be changed from Shelton "winning" to being killed.
Whether that's true or not, it feels like a last-minute re-tooling, and the only solace in Clyde's demise is that he manages to bring Foxx's lawyer down to his own murderous level.
Shelton got so damn close to winning, and the audience was right there behind him.