10 Recent Movies Ruined By Their Third Act
1. Longlegs
Osgood Perkins' Longlegs is certainly one of the most distinctive horror films of the entire year, and for its first hour-or-so, delivers a consistently stylish and unsettling mood exercise as a stoic FBI agent, Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), tracks down the titular serial killer (Nicolas Cage).
It's when Perkins feels the need to actually explain what's going on, however, that Longlegs starts to lose its way.
A colossal third act exposition dump reveals that Lee's mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) has been Longlegs' secret apprentice for years, in exchange for keeping Lee safe.
From here we learn Longlegs' full M.O. - he makes dolls imbued with satanic magic, has Ruth deliver them to the next family he plans to kill, and then lets the magic dolls possess the family members, causing them to kill one another.
Stopping the movie dead to reveal all of this feels like a disservice to the more confident filmmaking leading up to it, and it doesn't help that the information itself isn't all that interesting.
And top it all off, the film's final scene - in which Lee runs out of ammo before she can shoot one of the dolls - ends ambiguously enough to leave a good portion of the audience immensely frustrated at having sat through the whole damn thing.