The Definitive Guide to When Movie Plots Go Bad
CAUTION! SPOILERS!
Surprise endings have always existed in pop culture, with 'big reveals' or turnarounds eliciting gasps of realisation from audiences dealt a cunning bit of sleight-of-hand from film-makers. Sometimes these twists are sign-posted so blatantly that if you miss them you feel a fool (The Sixth Sense); other times they can come out of left-field, sending the film spiralling off into a whole new direction for the final act (Fight Club), and then sometimes they can cause you to slap your palm to your temple and shake your head in despair at how utterly atrocious they are. Unfortunately since the aforementioned M. Night Shyamalan movie and Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects, the 'twist' ending has been a main-stay of many films, making the terrible twist all the more common than an ingeniously worked out doozy. Here is the definitive guide of bad movie twists; CAUTION! SPOILERS!The Book of Eli (2010)
Denzel Washington protects the book of the title, Gary Oldman wants the book of the title. Because the book has power, y'see, the power to control people, and the book is the Bible. No, that isn't the twist. After two hours of Denzel's lone traveller heading towards the place he 'just knows' he's got to go to, keeping the book safe from all who try to nab it, kicking plenty of ass on the way, a shocking event occurs; Gary Oldman gets the book. Nevertheless, Denzel keeps going. He's finally made it to Alcatraz where people are saving all manner of humanity's treasures; film, literature, Rod Stewart records. Oldman prises open the lengthy tome, eagerly awaiting the powerful words printed within, only to find discover (Ha! Haa!) it's written in braille and Denzel was blind the whole time... Fortunately, Denzel has memorized the entirety of the Bible and before he dies recites it entirely to Malcom MacDowell to write down.Hancock (2008)
Peter Berg (director), Vincent Ngo, Vince Gilligan (writer)
Why does Charlize Theron hate her P.R. man husband representing Will Smith's titular superhero so much? Oh! It's because she's also a superhero. But, wait, no, they're not just superheroes, they've been alive for 3,000 years, they were built as a pair and when they are together their powers fade. Which is why 80 years ago when they were a couple and Hancock got hurt on the head, resulting in amnesia, she moved far away so that he could get his powers back and recover. Maybe this twist would've worked if it (a) didn't totally sap the film of its wry, wreckless charm and (b) wasn't featured so heavily in every single trailer for the movie. Word is they are attempting to make a sequel that will deeper explore the mythology. We're on tenterhooks. Next (2009)
Lee Tamahori (director), Gary Goldman, Jonathan Hensleigh, Paul Bernbaum (writers) For me, this is the worst twist I have ever seen, though in its favour it did surprise me and catch me off guard, but only because I didn't think a film-maker would be so offensive as to do this to an audience. Nicolas Cage can see into the future, he has visions, brief glimpses into what's just about to occur, allowing him to make a fine living as a Las Vegas magician. But, he dreams of Jessica Biel, believing his fated meeting with her - in a diner at a certain time on a day he can't predict - to be very important. His hypotheses is, that if he meets Biel then she will perhaps allow him to see farther into the future than he ever has before. Low and behold he meets her, they fall for one another and do bedroom things. Unfortunately the next day the FBI turn up and chase Nic, who runs away, with Biel in tow. After about an hour of this (our time), they catch up with him and finally say; "Please can you help us find out where this terrorists are planning on blowing us up from?" Nic reluctantly agrees and there's a big shoot out on a boat where he believes the nuclear bomb to be. They fight the baddies and deactivate the bomb. But then, Nic suddenly says something along the lines of; "Oh wait, I was wrong, the bomb is..." KABOOM! Everything blows up and America is reduced to dust and ashes. At which point, Nicolas Cage wakes up. He's back in bed with Jessica Biel just after they did the nasty, about two hours (our time) ago, and instead of running away from the FBI he says; "Ok, I'll help." And that's the end of the film. This twist is so incredibly infuriating because it breaks the number one rule, drummed into children at a very young age when writing stories; the 'It was all a dream...' ending is a terrible, terrible idea and very lazy and unsatisfying. Whilst many twists bare certain aspects of the 'All a dream...' mold, they don't result in everything you have just watched being rendered utterly pointless and inconsequential. The ending of "Next" boils down to Nicolas Cage deciding that watching "Next" is a bad idea, so he negates it from ever happening, except it did happen, it happened to us, the paying audience member...THE VILLAGE (2004)
M. Night Shyamalan (writer & director)
Being responsible for one of the most talked about twists of recent times with his debut feature The Sixth Sense, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan seemed to have a burden placed upon him to keep surprising, and second-guessing his audiences. He elegantly managed to pull the wool over his audience a second time with his finest film,Unbreakable, and just about got away with it in the claustrophobic alien invasion movie Signs but would then completely poo-poo his own successes with a run of ever-decreasing awfulness. The first offender was The Village, which might've been a passable film had it actually just stuck to its pre-twist guns of having mysterious creatures in the woods around an early American town. Instead we eventually discover that this primitive homestead is in fact a secure gated community, set up by paranoid rich folk after terrorist attacks in order to sustain a good ol' way of living. The creepy monsters being a costume that different elders would wear in order to spook the ignorant inhabitants. This is revealed when our heroine reaches the edge of the woods, climbs over a wall and walks onto a tarmac road, then confronting M. Night himself cameoing as a security guard! It was a twist so offensively obvious in many respects that as it was occuring you were willing the film to stop, jump back five minutes and not do it. You were begging him M. Night not to go there but you knew he would! M. Night has since abandoned such overt twist tactics, but sadly this hasn't helped things much with "The Happening" being one of the most hilariously terrible films of recent memory. And sadly, you feel like there is worse to come. IDENTITY (2003)
James Mangold (director), Michael Cooney (writer)
Another supernatural thriller, this mediocre John Cusack-led thriller finds a motley collection of strangers holed up in a spooky motel where they're gradually being bumped off. This is intercut with psychiatrist Alfred Molina transporting a deranged patient for a review. The strangers soon find out all manner of odd facts about one another, not least of all that they all share the same birthday. You can see Columbia execs just getting moist over that hook! Ultimately we discover that these people are in fact all aspects of Molina's patient's multiple personality disorder and they're being killed off as his different psyches vie for dominance! Er, great. Ultimately the psychotic child personality wins. PLANET OF THE APES (2001)
Tim Burton (director), William Broyles Jr, Lawrence Konner, Mark Rosenthal (writers)
When re-making a film with one of cinema's greatest twist endings how do you go about surprising an audience already prepared? How do you do justice to a finely crafted plot? How do you leave the audience amazed and bamboozled? By doing something absolutely and utterly nonsensical and completely devoid of all logic, apparently. In an act of space time continuum befuddlement that would frazzle even the dimensionally sound mind of Doc Emmet Brown, we see Mark Wahlberg's intrepid astronaut returning back to Earth through a storm only to find himself confronted by the Abraham Lincoln monument, but now sporting the monkey face of Tim Roth's evil General Thade. Then a load of officers of Washington's chimpanzee P.D. turn up and Wahlberg, and the audience, look confused. End of film. 
What's truly horrible about this ending is that it is entirely a twist for twist's sake - because the original film ended with a surprise so must this one. It's just a shame they didn't bother to try and come up with something that offered a genuine thrill rather than just an irrational sense of bewilderment, like there was some vital detail you had missed, but instead never even existed. ANTI-TRUST (1999)
Peter Howitt (director), Howard Franklin (writer)
Peter Howitt's follow-up to the excellently complex plotted rom-com Sliding Doorsfeatures Ryan Phillipe as a computer programmer hired by the Bill Gates-esque Tim Robbins, who is actually running a totally shady corporation that kills people and everything! The popcorn splutteringly hilarious shock reveal of where Robbins has been hiding his secret underground lair (or whatever it was) is done with a terrifying zoom towards a cartoon mouse mouse above a children's play area. Ugh.