Best trick/twist ending in a movie? (spoilers, of course!) (1 Viewer)

[Fred Bang]

I'll add one of the few comedies with a twist ending:

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

The crooks were actually been played all along by their victim.

 

[TheLongshot]

Jason

 

[JohnRice]

Here's a fun one nobody has mentioned. The In-Laws. The original. I've never seen the (apparently) pitiful remake.

 

[Matt^Brown]

I haven't seen anyone mention Running Scared. I can't say to much because I don't know how to use the spoiler tags.

 

[MatthewLouwrens]

Jason - Good point. It just depends where your focus is.

 

[Southpaw]

That was pretty good John. It had me interested throughout and you were right - the ending was good.

 

[Joe_H]

Another one, kind of along the same lines as Matchstick Men was Confidence.

 

[Phil Florian]

Shakespeare had some great "twist" endings. Maybe the "original" twist endings?? ROMEO & JULIET had one of the great, tragic surprise endings. You can bet your bottom dollar that an audience of that original play would have been chatting about it. But yes, most of his shows end just the way he says they will (or that the characters say they will...). Sure, they are cliche now but dang...if it can't be a cliche after 400 years...

Did someone already say Vampire's Kiss? I don't know if it is a "twist" ending but it is an interesting one. How about Neverending Story? The surprise? The twist? It ended. Didn't Homer Simpson sue that movie for false advertising?

Donnie Darko had a cool ending.

 

[MatthewLouwrens]

Of course, (reaching back into my memory of high schood studies) almost all of Shakespeare's plays were adaptations of earlier stories (I think The Tempest may be the only original story), so unless he changed the endings, the audience would not have been that surprised.

 

[Andres Munoz]

Was the ending for Spielberg's War of the Worlds the same as in the book?

 

[MatthewLouwrens]

Yes - while, from memory, I think they do add a scene where Cruise does destroy one tripod with a grenade (an obvious play to the crowds that would expect the hero to play some role), the alien threat is resolved in pretty much the exact same way it was in the book.

 

[AaronMan]

The Army of Darkness Director's Cut has a pretty good twist ending.

 

[Andres Munoz]

Thanks Matthew. What the hell was H.G Wells thinking? And all this time I was blaming Spielberg for the dumb ending.

 

[Shane Harg]

Just saw 16 Blocks last night. I thought it was very good film with a subtle yet unexpected little twist at the end.

 

[Stephen_L]

Andres, I loved the ending to H.G. Wells "War of the Worlds", and my opinion is shared by most who read it. The book was written at the end of the 19th Century when man's industrial hubris was at its peak. The Industrial Revolution had convinced most nations that nature could be tamed and harnessed with man's machines. This was also the beginning of industrialized warfare as well. One of Well's messages in the book was that man's arrogance and trust in machines was foolish and that nature held much greater power than machines. In the book WotW, the mighty Martians were felled not by man's industrial, war-machine might but by the tiniest and simplest of organisms in our air and water. We face the same challenge today. Nature in the form of AIDS, ebola, avian flu, drug resistant TB and other emerging diseases is poised to teach us that man and his creations are not the invulnerable rulers of the world that we think we are.

 

[Andres Munoz]

That's a good point Stephen. I guess the impact of a book/movie is affected heavily by at what point in time you're reading/watching.

 

[andrew markworthy]

Surprised that we've got this far without the following being mentioned:

Amelie (i.e. who the 'ghost' really is)
Total Recall (though where 'reality' begins in that movie is anyone's guess)
Spanish Prisoner (more twists than a pretzel)
Color of Money
The Mask (i.e. who was going to be the heroine and who the villainess - similar thing in that movie about the computer geek who deserts his fellow geeks to work for a big powerful and seemingly friendly giant firm and then discovers nasty things going on; sorry, forgotten the name)
Sixth Day


I've got to say that I guessed the twists in Planet of the Apes, Empire Strikes Back, Crying Game and Sixth Sense because someone said before each of them 'you'll never guess the twist in the plot'. The trouble is that as soon as someone does this, I find myself ignoring the movie and working out what the twist is. I prefer not to know a movie has a twist in it and then I can be surprised like everyone else.

 

[Cees Alons]

andrew,

That's my point too, invariably. I don't want to know that there is a "twist" in the first place, before I see the film or read the book!

In fact, I already hate reading on the back of the cover of a novel something like this: "The ... family are leading a normal and pleasant life in their little country town, devoid of intense moments, perhaps even dull, when suddenly the father, James ..., dies as the result of a tragic traffic incident. This novel describes the difficult struggle each member of the family is going through....", etc.

When I start reading that book, I want to read the "dull" first chapter like it is, I want to suspect nothing when, at the end of the chapter, James is leaving the house for a small errand, waving to his youngest daughter, starting his engine, driving slowly down the road. I want to be surprised by the accident. And when I read about an accident, I want to be able to believe for a moment that he might survive. Etc.
Even if the whole novel revolves around something else, I want to read everything like presented. Or else, why not start at chapter II immediately?
I hate, hate these spoilers.

A year ago, or so, there was a program on the BBC, where people from the audience could pose "funny" questions and one oh-so-funny guy started with the big spoiler of, uhm, that movie, uhm, of Bruce Willis, and only then put forward his not related question.
They all sort of chuckled and said "did you just say that to spoil the movie?', "yes I did, ha, ha", "well you're a bad boy" or so: if I had been in charge there, I would have had him officially and rather roughly thrown out of the studio in front of the camera, by a few of those Jerry Springer muscle men dressed in black, without listening to his question. Just to show him and everyone else how despicable it really is.

Did I say I hate spoilers, already? I HATE spoilers! They're so illiterate.


Cees

 

[DavidJ]

Great points Cees and Andrew and don't even get me stated on trailers. They have become the Cliff's Notes version of the film. If I know something is coming or suspect something is coming, it will lose much of its impact. It is to easy to be aware of what the filmmakers are trying to setup. In the words of Frank Costanza: "I like to go in fresh!"

 

[Yee-Ming]

Quite true, the complaint about the mere existence of the twist being a giveaway: potentially the biggest future twist in a Hollywood movie would be a Shyamalam movie that doesn't have one...

IIRC, somehow I stayed spoiler-free for Sixth Sense, and by the time I finally saw it relatively late in its run, I had sort-of forgotten it actually had a twist, so I wasn't looking for it and was pleasantly surprised when the penny (or should I say ring?) dropped. I guess it helps that generally I don't analyse movies as I watch them, I just go along for the ride.

As for trailers, to be fair "modern" trailers aren't as bad as those in the 70s, which often gave it all away. The "twist ending" is now so fashionable that at least the trailer editors take some effort in trying to avoid giving it away. However, to make them as attractive as possible, one thing trailers often do now is give away "the money shot", e.g. in Casino Royale we saw the car flip over when Bond tried to avoid running over Vesper, and also the Venetian building collapse with Vesper then stuck in the lift underwater and Bond trying to get her out. Not outright spoilers, but they do give away some element of suspense since we now know those events are coming.