10 Movie Endings Darker Than You Remembered
8. Everybody Forgets About Amanda - Taken
The original Taken may be the best of the increasingly absurd trilogy, and with its depiction of former CIA operative Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) employing his Special Set of Skills to rescue his kidnapped daughter from an Albanian sex trafficking ring, it's also inherently the darkest of the three films.
It's no secret that Bryan kicks ass and saves his darling daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) at the end, serving up a cathartic happy ending for popcorn-gobbling audiences... while totally glossing over the more horrifying truth of Bryan's revenge crusade.
A subplot earlier in the movie revolves around Kim's friend Amanda (Katie Cassidy), who is also kidnapped alongside her. Tragically, her corpse is later discovered by Bryan, dead from an enforced drugs overdose.
And yet, the end of the movie gives not a second thought to poor Amanda and her presumably devastated family - Amanda was nothing more than a prop, a plot device the film forgets about the second she's exhausted her function, to show the grim fate that Bryan must save his precious Kim from.
The ending may be a fortuitous one for the Mills family, but the outcome is still a net-negative - Amanda's dead, her family are left grief-stricken, and there's a bunch of other trafficked young girls whose fates are left totally up in the air.