10 Movies That Tricked You By Killing Main Characters Early

Derek Cianfrance is a quiet indie filmmaker you wouldn't necessarily expect anything shocking out of. Blunt and earnest, his films like Blue Valentine get uncomfortably personal with their subjects. The sexual explicitness of Blue Valentine is just as hard to watch as The Human Centipede, but for very different and very real reasons.

When 2012's The Place Beyond The Pines was released, audiences were primed for what appeared to be a solid heist picture with the always welcome Ryan Gosling as a motorcycle stuntman desperate to provide for his lover and her son by any means necessary. A bank robbery film with an emotional edge. What they didn't expect was a 2 1/2 hour epic that followed generations beyond the robbery.

Nor did they expect to see Gosling offed so unforgivingly. After making a desperate grab the cash he needs using his motorcycle, he's suddenly gunned down by a rookie police officer (Bradley Cooper), shot out of a three-story window to his death.

One would expect the story to end there, but instead it follows Cooper for another 15 years into the halls of politics, when his initial "heroic" action finally comes back to haunt him.