This movie had a great kidnapping mystery going on and then all of a sudden … oh noes! …
ALIENS!!!
Suckiest cop-out of all time.
exactly. You sit there trying to figure it out, but once that <spoiler> is introduced, well, anything goes and then what’s the point.
Are you trying to tell me that if I reverse the spin of the earth, time won’t go backwards? I’m pretty sure that was real, because I heard the Earth slowing down.
At the end of The Matador, I turned to my dad and said “What the hell?”. It was just getting to be a movie…and it ended.
Susan
And in the book Dorothy had to go to Glinda (who was not the Good Witch who met her in Munchkinland) to find out the secret of the silver slippers.
What was the problem?
Riiiighht…Bond “converts” Pussy Galore from lesbianism (someone contact Fred Phelps) and she suddenly changes sides…or, Pussy, realizing that Goldfinger is “totally mad, you know”, takes the opportunity to snitch on her employer and get immunity for her previous actions. And while the nerve gas may have been fake, the bullets weren’t. If Bond had just gotten into contact with the CIA earlier, they could have stopped the whole thing. What was with the laser, too? After making such a big deal about it (you’re thinking that they’re going to use it to cut through the walls of the Depository, but instead they just cut through a garage door that could have been more easily removed with explosives.)
I wouldn’t call Raiders a cop-out; the idea that Indiana Jones could really do anything to stop the German army is, frankly, a little outlandish. The opening the Arc sequence is a deus ex machina in the literal sense, but since the Arc is “a transmitter, a radio for speaking to God,” it’s not surprising that the resolution involves a supernatural entity, and in any case the end result is fully telegraphed: Colonel Musgrove: Now, what’s that supposed to be coming out of there?
Indiana: Lightning. Fire. The power of God or something.
Major Eaton: I’m beginning to understand Hitler’s interest in this.
Brody: The Bible speaks of the Ark leveling mountains and laying waste in entire regions. An Army that carries the Ark before it… is invincible.
The irony, such as it is, is that Indiana puts himself and Marion at great risk and peril, travels three quarters of the way around the world, outwits Hitler’s henchmen at every turn, and yet, if he’s stayed home brushing off old Mayan artifacts the world would be no worse off. It’s no more a cop-out than The Maltese Falcon.
Stranger
The last book of Steven King’s Dark Tower series. I could go on for pages as to why I found this to be a bad book, but the end itself… Won’t spoil it. But those of you who’ve read it know exactly what I’m talking about. Heck, when King himself puts in a warning in the penultimate chapter that folks probably won’t like the ending… It’s a sign. I kept feeling like King had written himself into a SERIOUS corner, and turned to one of the worlds’ most horrible cliches to save himself.
In the Maltese Falcon, Spade figured out who killed his partner. If he hadn’t he would still be under suspicion. He also got all the killers of other people arrested. Spade did it. Indy had no part in stopping the Nazis.
Speilberg’s War of the Worlds
Tom Cruise’s dipshit kid runs off into the mother of all fireballs, and shows up in Boston alive & well?!?!
WTF!?!?!
Actually the entire series from the 3rd season on turned out to be Roseanne’s novel. It was Roseanne (the actress)'s revenge for having creative control taken away from her and having the whole lottery thing foisted on them.
Raiders of the Lost Ark is a deus-ex-machina done right. In addition to the info at the beginning, we see the Ark itself burn the Nazi emblem off the crate. The audience is properly prepared for a supernatural ending. I might also add that in the Bible, when someone-or-other captured the Ark from the Israelites, God sent two plagues down on them until they gave it back. Messing with the Ark is a recipe for trouble.
(Even more ironically, the reason those guys were able to capture the Ark in the first place was because the Israelites had become wicked and unfaithful, and they had come to think of the Ark as a magical talisman, instead of as the symbol of God’s presence. So even if the Nazis hadn’t opened the Ark, it probably wouldn’t have given them victory. Truely, Indy really shouldn’t have bothered.)
Don’t know what was “reset” with that one. Robbie?
However, my favorite “wish it was this way” ending involves WOTW, and would’ve had Robbie still living at the end. I wrote it out a couple of months ago, and wtf, I’ll quote it again:
Of course, that might be too somber for audiences today… 
Sure, its the mother of all copouts.
However, certainly you’re not telling me that you are going with the “Earth going backwards = time going backwards” rather than the non-idiotic theory that when hitting rewind and watching the Earth spin it’ll see to be going backwards…
-Joe
Damn. I had no idea. Still, the way he constructed it sure as hell led you to believe that he was dead from the beginning.
And, oddly, if he could travel backward in time (presumably by flying at or above the speed of light), then why would intercepting two missiles be a problem? He zooms around the entire Earth several times a second, but can’t cross the U.S. in several minutes?
Tragically, the movie was written and produced by people who had little if any respect for the source material. One of the big recurring themes when time-travel became a common comic-book plot device was that he couldn’t change the past, despite really wanting to.
Because it takes a long time to accelerate to FTL speeds.
It was a giant spider, wasn’t it? 
I like Stephen King’s novels, but he can’t write an ending to save his life.
In the movie “The Matador,” you can practically see where the screening audience response caused an ending re-write. If only Ang Lee (aka “Happy ending? I got your Happy Ending right here”) had directed that one…
Oh, of COURSE. How silly of me.
Oh, yeah. The giant spider was a … disappointment.
But I thought the ending of the Dark Tower Saga was perfect. It fit the character (Roland’s whole raison d’etre was the quest). I was quite worried while reading through the saga that King was going to get stuck, like the end of It, or The Talisman, trying to describe some thing or some place that, based on the story, really defies a set description.
My admiration for King went up a couple of notches after the end of the Dark Tower series. It took balls, but good for him.
re Casino:
That’s just good moviemaking. A little misdirection for dramatic effect (especially since Scorcese didn’t just make it up) worked really well here, I think.