10 Terrible Movies With One Incredible Scene
8. The Final "Battle" - The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2
In many ways, Twilight finale Breaking Dawn - Part 2 is precisely the horrendous finale the series deserved: a spectacularly inept conclusion to a franchise that was Hollywood's veritable punching bag for five years.
Beyond the craven greed of pointlessly splitting the final book into two movies, Part 2 is par the course for the IP, packed with risible melodrama that's impossible to take seriously, a problematic central romance, and eyesore-inducing visual effects (namely a CGI baby that feels like a crime against humanity).
But director Bill Condon and writer Melissa Rosenberg pulled off one undeniably ingenious sleight of hand for the film's finale. Basically, the climax to the Breaking Dawn novel is, well, an anti-climax, in that there isn't a final battle and everything ends on a bit of a whimper.
So, how do you end a movie adapted from a book that has a total non-event of an ending? You make up a new one, but with a clever get-out clause.
Breaking Dawn - Part 2 ends with a totally insane and surprisingly brutal battle as the various heroic factions team up to battle the evil Volturi, with beloved characters being violently dismembered and decapitated left-and-right.
Fans were utterly shocked and distressed at what they were seeing, given that this sequence and these deaths never occurred in the novel.
Yet as the fight comes to an end, we pull back and it's revealed that the battle was really just a vision being shown to Volturi leader Aro (Michael Sheen) by Alice (Ashley Greene), which then convinces Aro to walk away.
As awful as the movie is, it's a genuinely great scene and smart piece of storytelling, giving the popcorn-munching audiences some thrilling action to close things out, but preventing die-hard fans from burning the cinema down by revealing it's actually a fake-out.
This is honestly one of the few times in cinema history that the "it was all a dream!" twist actually worked in a movie's favour, because it gave us an extra action scene that was denied by the source material.