10 Terrible Plot Twists From Otherwise Awesome Movies

A plot twist might seem like a small thing on paper, but the amount of sway it has over the quality of a film is considerable. Any twist is going to change the entire story, and in turn, that can have a huge knock-on effect on the rest of a movie. There are plenty of not-very-good movies out there that have been outright saved (or at least elevated significantly) by a good plot twist. Orphan: First Kill, Malignant, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines are just some examples of this.

And on the other side of the coin, you've got mostly strong films that happen to contain godawful plot twists, which is always jarring, to say the least. The following ten movies are great examples of this ironic trend. Their twists vary heavily from bad twist villains to illogical climaxes, but what they are united by is the awfulness of their respective twists. 

So, do these twists ruin their movies? Not quite, but they do undermine an otherwise strong work in each case, and they make the movies harder to revisit as a result.

In the James Bond classic Goldeneye, it turns out that Alec Trevelyan (Sean Bean), the former 006 who'd apparently died in the Soviet Union nine years earlier - as depicted in the film's pre-credits scene - is actually Janus, the supervillain trying to devastate the United Kingdom with a weaponized satellite. 

So, this twist is quite the outlier for it is, on paper, pretty great. Unlike with many badly done fake-out deaths, in this case, Alec is shown apparently being shot on-screen, and it at least looks convincing. Furthermore, Trevelyan is one of the greatest Bond villains ever, Bean gives one of his very finest performances (complete with one of his finest on-screen deaths, too), and the betrayal of a former ally gives the film heightened personal stakes for Bond (Pierce Brosnan). 

The problem, then? The marketing gave it away for free. The trailers clearly showed Sean Bean as the villain, and to make matters worse, the film's opening credits gave Bean high billing even though his character had seemingly just died, so he was obviously coming back. 

Goldeneye is an elite James Bond film, without question, but the way in which it insists on presenting this reveal as a plot twist even though it really wasn't is undeniably distracting.