10 More Awesome Plot Twists That Totally Saved Terrible Movies
3. Donnie Was The Real Criminal Mastermind - Den Of Thieves
Den of Thieves is a superficially passable heist film albeit one rendered tedious and exhausting due to its brutal 140 minute runtime, ensuring a potentially breezy crime thriller is elongated out with self-important subplots and masses of unearned "character development" drama.
Yet writer-director Christian Gudegast has a frankly delicious ace up his sleeve which ties the entire movie together in a satisfyingly ridiculous way, when we learn that low-key getaway driver Donnie (O'Shea Jackson Jr.) isn't quite the hapless everyman we've been led to believe.
The movie ends with a giddy homage to The Usual Suspects as Detective Nick O'Brien (a hammy Gerard Butler) discovers that Donnie was the heist's criminal mastermind all along.
Donnie worked his unassuming job as a bartender at a bar frequented by Federal Reserve employees to grift information about the Reserve's vaults, allowing him to plan the heist and get away with the money undetected.
As a cherry on top, the final scene shows Donnie now working at a pub in London, situated next to a diamond exchange.
As much as we've all seen way too many movies where the guy nobody expects to be the Big Bad is indeed the Big Bad, this was pulled off with just enough slick ballsiness to elevate the entire film. Much like Safe Haven, it actually made the movie worth revisiting with this new context in mind.