Kubo and the two strings. This fucking evil asshole who leaves death in his wake gets to start all over with a new happy life while everyone he killed is still dead? FUCK that guy.
The Breakfast Club; four of the five pair up, while Anthony Michael Hall does their work for them.
I’m glad you guys are having fun, but all I heard was a, “Whoosh. . .” May I inquire to ask as to what I missed?
Star Wars and Return of the Jedi, both of which end with the three leads celebrating after blowing up the Death Stars and killing the thousands of people on board.
I’ve only seen the first four movies in the series, so I don’t know how the others end, and I have no desire to find out.
Which reminds me - and this is a pretty strong contender.
Rogue One ends with all of the main characters dead, up to being vaporized as they hold each other. Vader romps and stomps his way through the Rebel forces in a horrifying manner. Sure, the Rebels get away with the plans…but every sympathetic character in the flick has been shot/and or vaporized, and we see pretty well all of them die.
This pattern is pretty common with action movies though. One of the Die Hard movies comes to mind, where they’re all yukking it up and the Christmas carols are playing and it is all super happy, but just hours earlier a hundred or more people have been murdered, including a whole bunch of people and families on that British airliner.
And doesn’t Star Wars have Princess Leia recovering very quickly from having billions of her fellow citizens murdered when her home planet is destroyed? That probably includes a whole bunch of close family and friends. I think she’s back to trading wisecracks with Solo in no time.
I have to admit, it often breaks my willful suspension of disbelief, even though I know I should just let it go in a cheap “light entertainment” action flick. The contrast between the “keep it light” swashbuckling nature and what would be a horrific genocide level event is too much of a clash. It’s kinda like making an action-comedy holocaust movie, and make the protagonists seem a little psychopathic. I think one of the new Star Trek movies did this too, and just casually threw in a few billion or so murders when a planet was destroyed. It feels cheap, like they couldn’t rely on good story telling or film making to keep things suspenseful, and instead just tried dialing the body count up to 11. It’s really unnecessary too, they make far more suspenseful movies with almost negligible stakes (high school dramas, underdog sports teams, etc.).
Worst Happy Ending: Titanic
Stupid old broad dumps a fucking Tit-Load valuable diamond into the ocean, in some stupid tribute to a guy she fucked 80 years before. :smack:
I bet your family could have used some of that diamond cash. :rolleyes:
Body Double is Brian de Palma’s 1984 [del]ripoff[/del] remake of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, 1958. Hitchcock didn’t have graphic violence, explicit nudity or cursing, but did have a downer ending. De Palma had *lots *of graphic violence, explicit nudity and cursing, and stuck on one of the dumbest happy endings ever.
Hahahaha, yes, definitely a good call-out on this one.
Also: John Sayles “Lone Star”. 
The Brian Bosworth 1991 action vehicle “Stone Cold” has maybe the worst happy ending I’ve ever seen in a movie, and it 100% wasn’t trying to be an ironic happy ending.
Basically there’s a Neo-Nazi biker gang in Alabama that has one of its members facing trial for the killing of a Preacher who was preaching against racism. The Alabama state district attorney wants the man to get the Death Penalty for his crime to crack down against these white supremacists. The bikers want to storm the trial and free their comrade and kill the Attorney General in retaliation. Brian Bosworth infiltrates the gang and along the way the gang starts killing more innocent people and cops and the Alabama Governor deploys the National Guard against them. The bikers wind up killing two national guardsmen and stealing their uniforms which they plan on using to infiltrate the trial. Right before their plan commences they find out Brian is an undercover cop and plan on killing him but strapping a bomb to him and throwing him from a helicopter into the the court house.
So the courthouse is heavily defended by hundreds of local, state, and federal police but the bikers are somehow able to steal a truck and infiltrate a dozen or so bikers into the court house where they proceed to not only kill the district attorney but the judge as well as the entire jury and lots of cops and innocent civilians as well. So there’s a giant shoot out going on in the court house and Brian overpowers the guys in the helicopter and lands it and at the very end manages to kill both the biker leader as well as the guy they were trying to rescue and the end of the movie is Brian Bosworth casually leaving the courthouse as the camera follows him and cool rock music plays.
But in the end of the day the bikers won and Brian Bosworth loss, as even though they didn’t rescue their biker comrade they still killed hundreds of people including all the people involved in the trial and dozens of random cops and civilians and the entire point of their rampage was to prove that the state/police couldn’t protect you from them and their racist ways. Like if Brian Bosworth didn’t intervene nothing much would change as the gang leader really didn’t have a chance of getting out alive anyway and he seemed to have knew it but just wanted to make a statement.
Don’t you just hate when that happens?
Dickens’s novel “Our Mutual Friend” has a naive garbageman inheriting a bunch of money and slowly turning into a miser. Except…it turns out that he was expertly faking it the whole time! Even when he was completely by himself, for some reason!
SUPERMAN II. Tons of collateral damage, but not in an ending where the big guy can say “I did what I could”; he can only say “I won’t let you down again.” And he came to realize that it won’t work out with the woman he loves — or, presumably, with any other woman — and, when the chips were down and Luthor seemed to see the light about putting aside differences to team up against a threat to humanity, our hero only got the win by correctly giving up hope that it’d actually happen.
That’s a little bleak for a superhero-defeats-the-bad-guys popcorn flick, yeah?
Also Superman III. Poor Straight Tower of Pisa statue seller guy. 
A “happy ending” is slang for a hand job given at the end of a massage.
Yes, that, and I was quoting Woody Allen from Manhattan: https://youtu.be/jf9d3cwVWBY
Star Wars: Total Party Kill 
I’m not sure whether this is really intended as a “happy” ending, exactly. It’s the kind of ending that occasionally occurs in war films: the mission is successful, but it costs the heroes a lot. Like in Saving Private Ryan, or The Dirty Dozen. We’re not supposed to celebrate, exactly, but to be glad that the heroes achieved their goal, while at the same time being saddened by the terrible toll it’s taken on them.
Fuck Stanislavski, Dickens invented method acting!
I found the ending of the first season of Goliath to to be both unbelievable and pretty “Deus Ex Machina”.
Verily.
But I think the part that really bugged me about the whole setup was a few of the positive reactions, from audiences I’ve seen to the ending—like, how positive and heartwarming it was that they “redeemed” the villain instead of killing him off. What? All they did was brainwash him—he wasn’t even sorry or trying to make amends or anything, he just got the magical, PG-rated equivalent of an involuntary ice cream scoop to the brain.
Poetic justice, if anything, turning him into the mild-manner opposite of everything he was and stood for. But about as “forgiving” as a good wipe and reformat is to malware.