We’re not talking bad movies but relatively decent movies that suffer from horrible endings. I can start with two.
Contact starts out so promising. Great idea, good pacing, solid acting. But I know full well, that the writers simply ran out of ideas on how to end the sucker and just gave up on it. The result? A movie that may have been able to deliver a knock-out punch, ends with a sorry little fizzle turning an otherwise decent film into a dreary let-down.
For the all-time stupidest ending, though you have to go back to the early seventies. Peter Fonda did a movie called Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry two guys and one gal who run around robbing gas stations and getting themselves into a series of mischief. At the end of the film, it appears they are just about to make it when -inexplicably- the car crashes into a freight train, a massive fireball ensues, and the end credits begin to roll. WTF??? Unbelievably lame-o.
The last 30-45 seconds of “Unbreakable.” Had they ended the film right before they went to freeze-frame, and printed the words on the screen (“Such and such later went on and yada yada yada”), it would have been an almost fantastic movie.
“The Destruction of Jared Syn.” He gets away. I guess they couldn’t make a movie titled, “The Teleportation of Jared Syn to Another Dimension.”
“Dances with Wolves.” My wife’s version of this movie ends where the Indians are all heading off into the mountains to hide from the cavalry, and Dunbar goes with them, rather than going back so that the cool wolf gets killed, and the cool horse gets killed, and Dunbar has to kill American soldiers who’re just doing their jobs because he had to get his book back so that the cavalry wouldn’t know what the Indians looked like, or wouldn’t know what their culture was, or that they were people with history and stories and names and things like that? He specifically went back to keep the American military from learning anything useful about the Indians that might cause the military to treat them as people, rather than vermin to hunt and kill. Good call, Dunbar. Oh, and you’re dead, too.
My wife also had a problem with the ending to Braveheart, but I pointed out that the Scots are still under British rule to this day, so the movie couldn’t have a really happy ending.
The ending of Pretty in Pink was different originally. According to one of the Uncle John’s Bathroom Readers (which cites another source…I don’t have the book with me), the original ending called for Molly Ringwald to end up with Ducky. However, test audiences thought that she should have ended up with Blane. So the studion went back and changed the ending to the one that made the finished product.
I understand that the director (whose name I forget) was dissatisfied with the ending to Pretty In Pink also, even though it was what the test audience evidently preferred. He went on to release Some Kind Of Wonderful, which was basically the same movie but with the female and male roles reversed…and allowed it to wind up with the guy getting together with the unrequited chick. So it all balances out.
I was always disapointed with the ending of The Truman Show. He’s in the boat and you know he’s going to find out about the real world and I was anticipating what he was going to do outside. He touches the wall, Ed Harris talks to him in a “I’m Big Brother and I want to keep watching you!” pleading way and he just goes through the door! That’s it! I wanted to see a huge crowd outside cheering for him, or that girlfriend of his meeting him there, or something! Maybe the whole fake town could have shut down in a fading drone. It must be quite an experience to live inside a fake bubble all of your life, just find out about it, and leave it to see the real world. Too bad I couldn’t see it. As for the rest of the movie, I did like it.
I had the same complaint about The Truman Show. I, too, wanted to see how he would cope in the outside world. However, my wife (who is much smarter than I am) explained it to me very simply: “He’s off camera now. The show is over. That’s why you don’t see what happens to him after he’s left.”
The Phantom Menace. I mean, come on. The great Jedi master died, we don’t know who luke’s father is (or if there even WAS one), they’ve got this huge plot thread of who the bad guy really was just hanging there. They’d need at least four or five more movies to tie up all the loose ends, and they just end the movie there!
Hey, I had no problem with Molly’s character getting together with Blane (which, by the way, is not a name, but a major appliance). If she hadn’t, the movie would have been pretty much a call to class warfare. (Pretty in Red???)
No, my problem with the ending was how easily Ducky bounced back, immediately hooking up with somebody else. That was a cop-out. A little good honest heartbreak woulda been better.
Right you are! The book was so much better in that regard. (I’m trying not to give away the ending for those that haven’t read it) I read an interview with Stephen King where he was talking about that book, and he commented on how sad he was rereading it, because he hadn’t realized that was going to happen. He hadn’t planned it, according to him.
Both the theatrical release AND the director’s cut.
Remember when the whole underwater drilling rig is brought up from the bottom and the people walk out with no ill effects? They resolve this with the incredibly well thought out device of having one of the characters say, “They [the aliens] must have done something to us…”
I love Ed Harris, but I had never seen this movie until yesterday morning. I have to agree with you. Personally, I thought the last shot should have been him laying underwater on the ledge, then had it fade to black as the credits rolled.
It was a cop-out, but some like it because it gives two versions. Stephen King has said that he got a LOT of complaints about Tad dying in the novel and King has always had to say, “I didn’t plan it like that. Kids die.” But the movie allows for the ending that the complainers would have liked to happen: Tad lives (but from the look of it, barely). I would have liked to see the Cambers come back from their trip and see their good ol’ dog Cujo dead, their dad dead, and a mess of a woman standing on their porch.
Well, if you read Orson Scott Card’s book, it’s explained in there that the aliens are actually really smart and can do stuff like that.
It was also explained in the book that the aliens could have stepped in at pretty much any time and taken the bomb away and made the whole plot a non-issue, but they just chose not to, because otherwise there wouldn’t have been any movie.
Blazing Saddles: Maybe I just don’t “get it,” but I didn’t like the whole self-aware, running around the movie lot ending. Ruined a perfectly good western :mad:
ANy movie that uses deus ex machina to bring about a resolution. The one that pops instantly into my head is Snake Eys starring Nicholas Cage. If I recall, The Ice Storm also had a similar “hand of the Gods” ending.
I also agree that The Truman Show ending was very bad. In fact it was terrible and I don’t buy the “TV show is over” argument because it simply is not consistent with the rest of the movie. The only dilemma facing Truman was finding that door and that was hardly compelling becuase you knew before you even saw the movie that that he would. How he would react to that and the options it presented…now that would be interesting.
