10 Awful Plot Twists That Completely Ruined Great Movies

9. Source Code

The Movie

Enjoyable sci-fi nonsense in which helicopter pilot Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) must keep returning to a locomotive-based crime scene - via state of the art Groundhog Day technology - to discover the culprit behind the train's bombing. The high concept is rivetingly executed by director Duncan Jones, who also happens to be David Bowie's son. Now let's never bring it up again.

The Awful Twist

The film enters deep 'whuh?' territory as soon as it disregards its own internal logic, logic which was already pretty shaky to begin with. After talk of a military accident, Stevens is revealed to be a barely-conscious torso wired up to machines in a lab - those machines are what keep him going back to the crime scene, inside the mind of some poor, long-dead schmuck, in an alternate reality-style scenario.

So, when Colter's mission is complete and the machines (along with his life-support) are shut down, his life should go the same way. Except it doesn't. Instead, Colter gets to take over the life of another man and continue to live in an alternate reality, with his consciousness somehow transferred over via... magic? It's a nice idea, that Colter can live again as an able-bodied man with the hot girl he just picked up on the train (Michelle Monaghan).

The problem is, it just doesn't work. In short, it's a plainly nonsensical twist, with no regard for the set-up that the film itself provided. They should've just shut him down and had done with it.