Back in February of last year, we talked about our favorite movie endings, but oddly, we’ve never talked about this:
What’s the worst movie ending ever?
It doesn’t necessarily have to be from a terrible film, either. I can imagine someone otherwise loving Citizen Kane who thinks the discovery of Rosebud’s identity at the end is howlingly idiotic. For instance.
I have a plethora of choices here. Shall I choose the gentle awfulness of The Happening, which appears to find triumph in petering out after a plot of nothing happening? Or another Shyamalan anti-classic, The Village, which is both mind-blowingly insulting and preposterous? Or how about the aliens ex machina wrapup of the awesomely terrible Knowing?
But I’m going, instead, with 2012, which ends on an “upbeat” note that wants us to find hope and happiness in the fact that, at last, one little girl has learned to control her bladder, and all it took was the wiping out of 99.9 percent of humanity. Awww…
Your worst ending?
(If you have a suggestion for a QOTD, feel free to email me. Responses to this QOTD sent by email will be ignored; please post your responses here.)
There’s probably worse, but the first one that comes to mind is Woman of the Year. It feels desperate.
Battle Royale.
That’s right. I said it.
Not only is it sappy as all hell it is completely unearned. Which would be fine if it was part of the satire, but I think we’re supposed to be happy for Mr. and Mrs. Insipid and their dumb luck “triumph”.
Anything that makes the previous action or drama pointless or irrelevant – “it was all a dream”, “rescue was coming all the time and you would have been better off sitting tight”, “everybody dies”.
(One of my tools for analysing a film is to ask what would have happened had the heroes not got involved.)
And this brings us to The Wizard of Oz. I’ve hated that ending since I was a small child for this very reason.
And I can’t believe you posted this 5 hours ago and nobody’s made the observation till now.
I didn’t have a problem with it until I later read the book and wondered why they had to make that particular change to the story.
I like the ending, partly because a number of my favorite writers have produced some of their best work in response to that ending. Salman Rushdie wrote a great essay about it, and Catherynne Valente started a children’s fantasy series, in part, to show the main character returning to Fairyland.
ETA: I also like the ending of the movie because of the old Silver Surfer comics. The character used to complain endlessly that he was trapped on Earth and couldn’t travel the universe. I felt a little insulted by that. I thought: Almost everyone reading this comic will spend his or her entire life on the planet Earth, but a lot of us manage to lead interesting lives.
On the other hand, I’m not sure I’d want Dorothy to stay in Kansas. The writer Mark Evanier pointed out that a lot of the people who worked on the movie, including the screenwriters, probably grew up in small towns like Dorothy’s, and they left them as soon as they could to work in Hollywood.
I would go with a message that’s somewhere in between the two extremes. In the picture book Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs by Mo Willems, the moral is: If you find yourself in the wrong story, leave.
Some of us hate all of the Wizard of Oz, not just the ending.
Hmm. I’m not sure Shakespeare would have agreed that “everybody dies” as an ending renders the previous drama pointless. :-)
I was thinking of “everyone we’ve met during the film”, which isn’t applicable to e.g. Romeo and Juliet, but actually now that I consider it there’s a recent film (and if you’ve seen it you’ll know which one I’m talking about) in which it’s clear at the end that not only are all the protagonists dead but everyone, all of humanity, is going to die…
…and yeah, actually, while that’s entirely dramatically in keeping with what’s gone before, to me it’s still just that little bit unsatisfying as a result.
Well, it worked in Doctor Strangelove.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHcunREYzNY
It’s arguable that if Indy hadn’t gotten involved in Raiders, the Ark would have melted Hitler’s face. Okay, the Nazi’s probably wouldn’t have found the Ark if Indy hadn’t led them to Marion, but really, pretty much every thing he did in the movie made the scenario worse, until he “won” by standing still with his eyes closed while tied to a post.
I recently watched the 1967 Casino Royale and (Spoilers, as if anyone cares) in the end everybody dies, but only after the stupidest fight scene ever put on celluloid. It was rather like the ending to Blazing Saddles, only way, WAY dumber.
My husband and I highly dislike movies where at the end, through some form of time travel or some such, you’re just back at the beginning of the movie. Like Prince of Persia, or Deja Vu, or Next. You feel like you’ve just wasted your time. Plus, usually the main character, a guy most often, spent the whole movie getting a girl to fall in love with him. Then at the end she has no idea who he is, so he would have to get her to fall in love with him all over again. If it were me, I’d be all, screw that!! Funnily enough, I LOVE episodes of my favorite TV shows that do this. Buffy and Angel both had at least one, and they are awesome. Probably usually because you can kill off the whole cast, then it never actually happened.
The last ten minutes of ‘Minority Report’ pretty much ruined the whole film for me.
It didn’t quite ruin it for me, but I get you. Spielberg had a big problem for a while with tacked-on happy endings to movies that didn’t need them. I think A.I. was much worse in that respect: There was a point at which the movie should clearly have ended, which would have been ironic and bittersweet, but satisfying, then he spent twenty more minutes on a nonsensical coda.
I think the coda added quite a lot to AI. Especially if you consider what really happened at the end, which was
** spoiler **
The human race completely gone, only their robotic descendants remaining, love (parental at least) as a concept relegated to archaeology, and a completely manufactured happy end as an act of mercy from that robotic race towards their beloved, monomaniacal ancestor. ‘Cause if you think that thing at the end was actually David’s mommy (‘pulled from the time stream’ or something) and not a crappy VR simulation for his benefit, I’ve got this nice bridge to sell you. Like I said, it’s a manufactured happy ending, but not by Spielberg but the characters themselves. The whole movie takes a pretty distant, Kubrickian view of love.
Minority Report does have a bad ending though.
*CONTINUED SPOILERS*
Ultimately, though, I don’t think the coda does anything that isn’t achieved by ending the film at the Blue Fairy. Whether David is at the bottom of the ocean with the Blue Fairy or with a VR program provided by the future robots, he still ends up effectively spending eternity with a simulacrum of his mother – which is what he’s really been seeking the whole time. I just think the Blue Fairy ending provides that in a poetic, metaphoric way that the coda then reiterates in a much more ham-fistedly obvious way.
I guess it’s up to the individual to decide which is more in keeping with a Kubrickian approach. After all, Kubrick wanted Spielberg to direct A.I. precisely because of his more sympathetic emotional attitude. Then again, one other way of looking at the ending is as a sly and somewhat cruel Oedipal joke – David in bed with his mother. Kubrick would certainly have appreciated that layer of the film’s psyche.
It’s mentioned before in other forums, that the coda was entirely Kubrick’s idea. As horribly sentimental and Spielbergian as it was
The ending of A.I. is not about the boy and his wish. The wish serves a larger point: that the robots became capable of showing compassion toward someone with more limited capacity than themselves, far more so than the humans who built them.
Ooh, I like that! Didn’t think about it that way, but it does make for sort of an optimistic ending.
I was thinking the same thing, of that [spoiler] beautifully tragic moment with the camera pulling away from the “little wooden boy” so close, yet so far away from his wish come true. I remember thinking what a great ending it was, until the voice-over began and Spielberg proceeded to soften the blow.
The need for a voiceover exposition wasn’t needed for ‘Report’. They could have just panned the camera over the empty Temple, a shot of Cruise and his pregnant wife showing they’d moved on with a fresh start at a family, and a closing image on Agatha smiling while reading her book. The viewers would have known that All Ends Well.
I can’t say it’s the worst ending ever, but the entirety of Prometheus makes it’s horrible ending even worse by association.
The manipulative and mean-spirited ending of “Atonement” seemed to punish the viewer for being naive (or even gullible) and hopeful about a positive outcome.
I dislike the character from “Atonement” very much, indeed, but I thought it was a good ending. It wasn’t manipulative and mean-spirited–the character was. And despite her intention of atoning, her actions in the ending shows she hasn’t learned a thing, and is still the arrogant shit she’s always been.
It’s been, what, 36 years and I’m STILL pissed off at the end of Ralph Bakshi’s “Wizards”. Whole movie sets up an epic clash that gets short-shrifted in a casual, trying-to-be-funny-but-failing manner that’s out of established character to boot. These days fantasy movies are three for a penny, but in 1977 we had to savor what we could get, and this was very thin gruel indeed…
I disagree that the ending of “Wizards” is out of character (assuming you’re talking about Avatar’s character, and his meeting with his brother). Consider his earlier pep talk to Peace. Avatar was a mean S.O.B. when pissed off; by the time he meets his brother, he’s also despondant over an ally’s apparent betrayal.
I really hate the final part of Explorers. Most of the movie is a fun film about a group of smart kids who build their own space ship. It has the feel of a reasonable 1950s SF young adult novel. But then the silly aliens show up, and the movie goes downhill very quickly.
If the end of The Women (original 1939 ver.) doesn’t make you throw up a little in your mouth, you have a very strong (or very empty) stomach. It’s also one of the few movies to feature an all female case that still (albeit intentionally) fails the Bechdel test. Despite all of this, the skilled acting and writing make it worth watching, especially if you’re a Rosalind Russell fan – and why wouldn’t you be? I can’t bring myself to watch the remake with JLo though.
Ugh. Yes.
Ugh, it’s not just the ending of that movie I can’t stand, it’s the entirety of it. What a waste of a brilliant cast on misogynist claptrap.
Dances with wolves and Monty Python’s Holy Grail. I enjoyed both movies but wanted to throw something at the television after their terrible endings. Spoiler:(I get being arrested at the end of Holy Grail is part of the joke but talk about disappointing)
I was reminded of Holy Grail while watching the end of Blazing Saddles recently, and it got me wondering: Is there a name for the dramatic device of ending a story with that particular sort of 4th-wall shenanigans? It was frustrating in Holy Grail, but kind of brilliant in Blazing Saddles (perhaps because it was carried so much further).
I actually thought about Blazing Saddles when mentioning Holy Grail. But, to me, the end of Blazzing Saddles worked and Holy Grail didn’t.
The Illusionist with Edward Norton. SPOILER If you’re the protagonist and you frame your adversary for a murder he didn’t commit — causing him to commit suicide in despair, and thus freeing your lady love to be with you happily ever after — you’ve pretty much lost all my sympathy.
I think the problem I had with the Illusionist was that Edward Norton and Jessica Biel were meant to be the same age. Erm … no.
I’m pretty sure none of the two were meant to be sympathetic. I saw them as two men utterly obsessed with their craft and their intense rivalry locked in a struggle destructive to themselves and the people around them.
2002’s Frailty with Bill Paxton. What would of been one of the most frightening films ever put out by mainstream Hollywood is totally undone by a cheap M. Night Shyamalan-like twist ending.
I’m still uncertain whether the end of The Mist is appropriate or terrible. However, I lean towards terrible. It just seemed abrupt and pointlessly cruel. It was a great movie up until then, but it was all about keeping hope in your fellow humans, and then as soon as he car ran out of gas: Mass suicide! What made it even worse was that the army was right behind them, so it made it feel like a joke- “Ha, ha, you just had to wait a few minutes! Now your family’s dead!” It would have been slightly better if they’d shown him wandering for hours before he found help. All in all, it seemed like a cruel punchline from The Outer Limits, not a genuinely earned tragic ending.
See I loved that ending, as brutal and wrenching as it was. It felt genuine, and dare I say, Shakespearean to me.
I haven’t seen the film but I know how it ends and I have to say I agree with Less Lee Moore. It’s quite a fitting ending.
I hated the ending of The Mist, too. After leading the battle for survival for the whole movie, the hero suddenly and without reason decides to do a Jonestown. Loser.
Leaving aside the ridiculous suicide stunt, I was infuriated that the military was able to even annoy the monsters.
In the original short story (a great favorite of mine, in which King was doing a very fine Lovecraft imitation), the military accidentally opened a gateway through which skyscraper-sized Old Ones walked along with their smaller minions. The only ones who killed themselves were two soldiers who happened to be in the store. THEY knew what had happened, and that there was no hope, and the ending was one of everlasting dread as the characters faced lives of scuttling and hiding from the new masters of Earth.
The Perfect Storm. Why bother with showing us how they fight to stay afloat? They didn’t save anybody. They didn’t become the greatest fishermen alive. The fought and failed. The end.
Pretty much any M.Night movie ever after his first one, but Signs in particular. Why did he have to show the aliens at all, much less end it on the ridiculous note that the movie ended on?
Also, the ending of I Am Legend annoys the hell out of me mostly because a vastly superior ending is included in the DVD bonus features.
Oh, thanks for reminding me. Yes, I Am Legend should have stuck with the book’s ending, which apparently was filmed but not released.
I’d agree with you on Signs and all subsequent Shyamalan films. But, Unbreakable is brilliant. In fact, it has a quality of the original Rod Serling Twilight Zone–rewatchability even after knowing the ending.
Unbreakable. I still get mad thinking about it. It would have been better if it had a been a twist! Ugh. If anyone’s seen the movie Straight On Till Morning…that ending – beginning with the recording of the dog’s murder and then just fading into confusion – infuriated me.
Unbreakable was the one that immediately sprang to mind for me, and all because of the text. If it didn’t have the text explaining the what happened after the freeze frame I probably would have been more disposed to like the ending.
yes I still sorta wish they had made a sequel sorta I’m in 2 minds ….
Man, this thread is a dodge and weave of spoilers. People need to put bigger gaps between the movie title and the ending explanation. Not everyone has seen every movie.
I have a terrible memory, so trying to recall bad endings is tough.
I definitely agree on all the M. Night movies.
2012’s ending was horrible, but so was the movie. Same with Independence Day.
Magic Mike had a terrible ending. It just…stops. No real resolution.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – AAUUGGHH! I HATED the ending here. Demeaned all that came before.
Maybe you won’t remember the spoilers in the thread then.
Hmm. Good point.
I had to look back through my movie reviews to find some that applied to this thread.
I didn’t see anything so far that would ruin a movie. I just said that as a cautionary note.
2012 was a terrible movie so it doesn’t count. It should be a movie which raises your expectations for a decent ending and then fails. 2012 is too easy a choice.
I agree. I only used it because MaryAnn brought it up. I assume you’ll also tell MaryAnn that her using it doesn’t count as well?
; – )
MaryAnn it doesn’t count because the rest of the movie is on a par with it!
Any film where they completely waste my investment in the character – Sucker Punch for instance. I wouldn’t watch The Mist for the same reason.
I understand not every film has to have a happy ending, but I expect an appropriate ending. I hated the Korean movie The Host for instance (spoilers) because after all her trials and tribulations the girl is killed and the family just transfer their affection to the stray boy. I threw it away.
Alien Resurrection and Titan A.E. Both were enjoyable movies, but the endings completely soured me on the entire experience.
What was it about Alien Resurrection that particularly got to you? (For me it was the newborn scene – jarringly sadistic.)
Everything about the “Newborn”, what it looked like, what it did, how it died.
SPOILERS
For starters, it looked like a famished slitheen with a massive obvious vagina. It looked like it was designed by someone who had Geiger’s xenomorph and psychosexual schtick described to them, rather than actually studying the art. Compared to the Alien queen and dog, or even the nightmarish Ripley/alien hybrids earlier in the film, it didn’t feel like it fit.
Second, it never really came across as an existential threat the way the Queen does in Aliens or Alien3. This thing was orbiting Earth after all; no way is one frankenstein alien more horrifying in that context than a facehugger-egg-laying Queen.
Finally, the death was so over-the-top gory that it overshadowed any sense of tension or relief. Watching the alien get sucked out the hatch at the last second in the first two movies; cathatric. Watching it get sucked out through the back of it’s own head, ridiculous.
I’m with Robert Ebert on Knowing – it’s a great flick! I’m sitting there going – standard action movie, Nic Cage is gonna SAVE THE DAY and then SPOILERS everybody dies. Everybody. I thought that was great!
The worst one I have ever seen is definitely The Devil Inside where at the end of what would be the second act of any other movie, everybody suddenly dies in a car crash followed by a mess-
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It’s not the ending itself of 2005’s War of the Worlds remake, but the outcome of one character that infuriates me. I just wanted to slug Spielberg in the face for that one.
I thought it worked very well in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but they broke the fourth wall in a number of places throughout.
On the other hand, I thought the ending of Blazing Saddles, while clever, went on too long.
MaryAnn, looks like your “Early returns…” FB post is gonna name M. Night Shyamalan the King of the Bad Ending. I can’t disagree.
I’ll add Jacob’s Ladder , Black Swan, and Planet of the Apes (both versions).
What was wrong with Jacob’s Ladder? I thought it was satisfying, but ambiguous at the same time.
SPOILER
Jacob’s Ladder included all sort of stuff about post-Vietnam America that Tim Robbins’ character couldn’t possibly know if he died during action abroad.
That’s why I figured they were in some sort of purgatory the whole time until they came to grips with their actions. Again, it’s left ambiguous whether it’s all in his head or not.
Monster A-Go-Go. I saw the MST3K take on it, and oh GOD was it bad.
What happened was they were making a traditional albeit psychedelic Bond movie with Peter Sellers, but he railed against what the director was doing and Sellers and Orson Welles could not stand each other, so Sellers quit halfway through. They brought in a handful of other directors to add other bits and parts – hence the literal patchwork plot – and threw it at the screen hoping everyone would think it a standard 60s camp spoof. Thank God for the faithful-to-the-book Craig remake.
Oh, I know all about the troubled history. I guess the concept of professionalism hadn’t been invented yet.
Godzilla — the Matthew Broderick version.
The whole movie is a mess, but it fundamentally fails as a Godzilla movie at the end. Godzilla is not killable by mere mortal aircraft and weapons. Godzilla mostly ignores them, or destroys the pests with atomic fire. When Godzilla is (seemingly) killed, it is by super science, or another similar creature. It’s a mythic story people, not King Kong retold.
THE MISSION has by far the worst ending of any “good” movie ever. All the characters you’ve just invested 2 hours caring about end up graphically tortured to death and then the narration preceding the end credits has to add how the torturers and their descendants went on to live happily ever after while the descendants of the handful of victims who survived endured 2 centuries of misery.
I practically wanted to attack the screen with a fire axe when the lights came up!
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. My hubs said “It’s a Holocaust movie, what did you expect?” I thought there’d at least be SOME even slight hope at the end of the movie? Like Schindler’s List, at least some people were freed. The end of the book was even worse-something like, (spoilers) “And through all the chaos and confusion that followed, he never lost hold of his hand.”
I’m going to have to go with either Buried or The Bourne Legacy. Probably not the worst endings I’ve ever seen, but they definitely come to mind as sour endings to movies I was otherwise enjoying.
Buried … I could have gone with either the cheesy typical “they actually rescue him”, or “he’s trapped and dies, and by the way the one they found was the guy that the rescuer claimed he had saved” … but faking lives to the extent they did only to go “oh, no” AND “oh but it’s that guy that was a lie” … it just seemed like -too much- diabolus ex machina, too much of a forced unhappy ending.
Legacy … I’m so sick of movies that are built on the assumption of being part of a larger whole, and so don’t feel a need to be three independent but linked narratives that can stand somewhat on their own (like at least 2/3 of the original bourne trilogy, or star wars) … Legacy felt more like a pilot than a movie, in the end it didn’t END, so much as merely stop “until next week” (if/whenever they make another Renner Bourne movie)… and that’s just getting obnoxious to the point of irritating. Terrible ending, by not being an ending.
Oh yeah and with The Dark Knight Rises…
…
… I can see and appreciate the point of it, that in the end “Bruce Wayne” didn’t ‘need’ to die, only The Batman – it still kind of comes off as cheap and hollywood-y. I wish it, at the least, it had been more ambiguous. Like maybe we don’t see Bruce, but keep the scene of Fox discussing the autopilot…
…not to mention how forced and stage-fake Talia’s death looked, or how it makes no sense “we want to keep this bomb off their hands, let’s have a car chase where they can herd us towards a place instead of just backing it into a building”.
Pretty in Pink. Other movies have had disappointing endings that made me sad or ticked or otherwise irritated, but that was my first disappointing ending, and I was 15 and that just went straight to my heart with the NOOOOOO!
Seconded.
I’m going to nominate Dead Poets Society. The students help get their teacher fired, and then they jump up on top of their desks to talk about how much they love him.
Seconded. The only good thing about that scene is that it inspired the scene in The League of Gentlemen:
“Pauline!”