10 Movies That Pissed Audiences Off In The Final Scene
6. No Country For Old Men
The Coen brothers' Best Picture-winning thriller is arguably the best movie of their inestimable back catalogue, a deliriously entertaining genre film which brings Cormac McCarthy's rich novelistic vision to the screen with incredible skill.
But it's also a film which upended audience expectations in one major way, by refusing to give them all the typical genre trimmings they were surely anticipating.
The story is set up for viewers to expect a traditional showdown between the film's closest thing to a hero, hunter Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), and the Terminator-like antagonist attempting to reclaim $2 million in cash, Anton Chigurh (an Oscar-winning Javier Bardem).
But ultimately Moss ends up killed off-screen by random Mexican gangsters at the end of the film's second act, leaving audiences to assume that weathered Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) would now be the one to finally take Chigurh down.
Except, that never happens, because there's never any sort of major standoff between Bell and Chigurh at all.
Chigurh manages to get away, presumably with the money, while Bell retires from the police and the final scene simply seems him explaining two of his recent, deeply allegorical dreams to his wife.
Anyone expecting a traditional, cathartic ending - as many were - was totally out of luck, because the Coens eschewed it in favour of one which let the bad guy get away and the only "hero" left standing unable to do anything about it.