9 Movies That End Without Solving A Major Problem

The original Death Wish hasn’t aged well, but it works thanks to the gritty subject matter and Charles Bronson’s manly charisma. In the movie he plays an architect whose wife and daughter are savagely attacked; his daughter is left in a catatonic state and his wife dies of her injuries. Bronson eventually picks up a gun and walks the streets looking for muggers to shoot; he doesn’t have to look very far most nights.

In a typical vigilante film the expectation might be he’d find and kill the gang that attacked his loved ones – a group which includes a fresh-faced Jeff Goldblum – but surprisingly this never happens. He never even attempts to track them down, being content to just shoot whatever mugger crosses his path.

Apparently, there was a version of the script where he does run across them and they end up killing him, but this grim turn of events was rejected. At the end of the film he hangs up his gun and moves to a new city, but despite a further four movies the gang that set him off are never found.