Primal Fear had a great ending.
The unbreakable ending didn’t really “ring true” for me. It makes sense, I guess, but there are lots of logical problems with it… it seems like it was just sort of done that way for the sake of having a twist ending.
On second thought, I guess it’s really core to the whole story, but something still doesn’t really ring true about it.
Don’t read if you haven’t seen it:
Maybe it’s just that “Mr. Glass” was just a really frail guy. The premise of the ending relies on him being an archrival supervillain character - and he’s not. He’s just some weak guy who likes comic books.
There are other reasons it didn’t really ring true with me, but I can’t think of them offhand.
“The Game” did the same thing to me.
When the movie starts off, you can see the ending from a mile away. You know it’s going to end the way it actually does. Then it gets even more twisted, more intriguing… and you tell yourself “I was wrong… no way it has that predictable, blah ending”. So you watch, intrigued, wondering what the twist could be, and it turns out there’s no real surprise ending afterall - it ends exactly as you’d predicted in the first 20 minutes, the lame, predictable ending that you were dreading.
I guess the surprise ending could be that that the ending was totally predictable. You expected something interesting, creating, and entertaining, and it surprised you by giving you something predictable and dull.
Suprise! 2 hours of your life is gone! 
Well, I don’t want to just critique, so I’ll add that I thought the endings to ** Fight Club ** and ** Memento ** were great.
That should be “creative”.
I also was going to say Memento. And since no one else has mentioned it yet, The Others. Awesome movie with a great shocker at the end!
It’s a surprise ending, alright. Lot of fun. Thank You.
but I do think the ending was a cop-out.
OK, you may not believe me, but I called the ending of The Usual Suspects. I didn’t know why, I just called it to my girlfriend at the time. But it was still a great twist.
On the other hand, The Others totally threw me for a loop. Of course, my wife saw it coming the whole time.
Unbreakable
Never saw that coming realy freaked me out the first time
Hate to be nitpicky, but Fight Club doesn’t really have a “surprise ending”–the “surprise” actually comes about a half-hour before the movie ends.
Okay, first off, the all-time surprise ending is The Sting.
I knew there was going to a be a surprise ending to The Usual Suspects, but I was so wrapped up in the story that I didn’t even think about it. And then it just instantly came to me about 90 seconds before it was revealed on screen. I felt extremely clever. Same thing with Sleuth, I recognized the surprise about halfway through; so I had some time being suckered and then some time knowing what was going on, and it was just right. I think if a movie reveals its secret well it can be great fun, even if you don’t have that one moment when your jaw drops.
It’s not quite what you’re looking for, but there’s a surprise at the end of Magnolia. (Yeah, somebody tell me you saw that coming.) And there’s a movie called The Last of Sheila that has a nice twist at the end. I have no idea if you’ll be able to find a copy, it’s from 1973, may have been made for television.
Jacob’s Ladder had me guessing all the way through it. Terrific film!
The scene where the “trick” is revealed in The Usual Suspects never, ever fails to amaze me. Same thing with The 6th Sense.
SenorBeef, I think you missed something in Unbreakable.
“Mr Glass” was indeed a frail guy who liked comic books. But his interest in comic books bled into his real life. He wondered if there might be a person who was as strong as he was weak. So he staged a few disasters to see if anyone survived. He blew up buildings and wrecked a train. That sounds like a archrival supervillain to me
“Best Laid Plans”
“Arlington Road”
Y’know, there have been computer game threads where the “save anywhere” issue is debated, with the anti-save crowd making the argument that it destroys tension. To which I always reply: consider Half-Life, which allowed quicksaves anywhere, but which moved along so crisply that I frequently forgot to save because I let myself get wrapped up in the game.
The best “movies with a twist” are like that. Even if you know there’s a twist, if the plot is good and the dialog crisp and the characters well-acted, as you watch you forget to look for the twist and just let yourself be absorbed into the film. And then you’re really, genuinely surprised by the twist ending because you’ve forgotten to look for it.
The problem with a lot of these films is that they focus so much on the twist that they neglect the other aspects of making a good film. And that ruins the twist – the only thing the film has going for it – because the audience, instead of getting wrapped up in the film, is sitting there trying to see where the twist is coming. And they usually succeed, and then feel let down.
I also got The Usual Suspects. I didn’t get Sixth Sense, Arlington Road, and I didn’t care about Unbreakable and No Way Out to try to figure them out.
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Did anyone else notice how M. Night Shamalamadingdong’s work in Unbreakable was forgotten when pushing Signs?
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I very much liked the ending to Twelve Monkeys.
I’m usually pretty good at figuring something out in a movie before it is revealed. Or, in the case of a movie with a twist I will have heard to expect a twist before it occurs.
However, Arlington Road blew me away. I saw the movie on vide about a year after it came out. I had no idea what the movie was about. Somehow, I competely missed (or ignored or forgot) all publicity about it when it was new. The ending of it never occured to me while watching it and I was really thrown off.
All in all, I really like that movie simply because it all came as such a surprise to me.
It was was pretty cheezy flick, but I was pretty surprised by the ending of Shattered with Tom Berenger.