12 Recent Films That Fell Apart In The Final Act
3. Candyman (2021)
2021's Candyman requel was doing OK for most of its runtime. It does a solid job of reintroducing the Candyman legend and although the social commentary is ridiculously unsubtle, the film does at least serve up some punchy set-pieces.
The film had the ingredients there to deliver a powerful final act... it just didn't do anything with them. Like, at all.
The entire final act of Candyman (2021) is a truncated, rushed mess complete with yet another ghastly twist villain. It's revealed that William (Colman Domingo), a side character who'd mainly served as the Basil Exposition role throughout the film, has been trying to resurrect Candyman in order to take revenge on the racist forces in their community. He's been transforming protagonist Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) into a new Candyman.
The film doesn't actually bother explaining how William was doing this, and this is another example of a complete anticlimax. William and Anthony are killed, Anthony transforms into a new Candyman and kills a bunch of one-dimensional evil cops. Then, the original Candyman (Tony Todd, criminally wasted) appears and tells Anthony's girlfriend (Teyonah Parris) to spread the legend. End of film.
One can well imagine this ending working better had the film been at least half an hour longer, so this is yet another enormously frustrating example of a movie flying off the rails in the final reels.