9. War of the Worlds (2005)
This won't be the only time that Steven Spielberg appears on this list, because he has a habit of pulling things back from the brink when they seem pretty damn hopeless. Mid-way through this generally solid take on War of the Worlds, one of Tom Cruise's kids, the older boy, decides to run off head-long into the carnage, with the assumption being that he has been killed, a pretty ballsy move for a director whose films focus so much on family, right? Wrong. Instead, the kid shows up totally unscathed in the final moments of the film, taking what could have been a thorny, emotionally wrenching ending and just turning it into a typically schmaltzy, lazy climax. Spielberg really had a chance to do something interesting here, and instead had the kid randomly appear out of nowhere without any explanation.