Few things can beat an emotionally satisfying ending to a film, though too often, filmmakers think they're shooting for something resonant, when in fact all they've done is deliver an unconvincingly cloying finale to a film that was otherwise pretty good. More so than downbeat endings, a good happy ending has to be
earned; if we don't feel the characters struggle through dire circumstances, then their salvation at the end isn't nearly as rewarding. These 10 films, however, sort of went the other way; so dire were the circumstances against the characters that a happy ending seemed completely out of reach, before arriving totally out of nowhere and surprising us all. Though in a few instances the
intent was to be jarring, for the most part these are happy endings that don't seem to fit what has become before; we had been building ourselves up for misery, and most of these happy endings seemed like quick fixes. Though not exclusively, some of them even resorted to down-right deus ex machina. Here are 10 happy movie endings that came totally out of nowhere...
10. Bad Lieutenant
The original Abel Ferrara Bad Lieutenant is about as grim as police movies come. Harvey Keitel played the titular character, and the result of his increasing depravity throughout the film - including rampant drug use and sexual assault - is that he ends up being shot in his car at the very end. Few would deny that he had it coming, and when it was announced that Werner Herzog was directing a retooling, one did not expect...this. Nicolas Cage takes the Lieutenant role this time, and Herzog's curiously idiosyncratic tone throughout should have clued us into the fact that nothing was going to be as we expected. At every turn, Herzog slyly subverts the conventions of the police procedural, leading into a hilarious ending which is far happier than Cage's character, who remains hopped up on Heroin and unpunished for his heinously corrupt crimes, deserves. In the film's final scenes, he not only has a child on the way by his hot girlfriend (Eva Mendes), but he's been promoted to Captain despite his lascivious acts throughout. It would have made total sense for one of the many enemies he had to gun him down at the end; instead, Herzog sticks his middle finger up at convention and gives us a good laugh instead.