Self-defeating movies

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"How tall is King Kong ?"
Let's be cautious with spoilers here.

What are the films that looked great up to the point where OH NO they completely ruined themselves. I'm not talking about sequels, but about the movies themselves, which you were enthusiastically endorsing until the twist, or the turn, or the line, or the scene, that prevents you to recommend it after all.

I'm thinking of films such as (for me) :

- Die Another Day. Which, despite a cringeworthy Madonna song, was looking like a great return to Goldeneye quality for Brosnan's Bond. Untill the second part, and the ice castle, and the invisible car, and the sub-Escape-From-LA surf scene, and just all the oh my god this is actually the worst Bond ever what was I thinking. Felt like going back to the wrong projection room after the intermission.

- The Prestige which was a clever, tricky, ingenious mystery until
WARNING: spoilers below
oh look the magician's cunning trick is that he was actually using absurd sci-fi magic all along, and in the most stupid possible way, didn't see that coming did you
. So no, not the movie I was assuming it to be as I was enjoying it.

- The Discovery of Heaven is an epic, clever, haunting movie that delighted me during its full first half, with its wit and great relationship between Stephen Fry's character and his best pal. Aaaand then there's the second half, which follows a very boring character in his very boring quest for a very long time in a very long movie and then the end. If they had made it a two-parter, it would have been one great film and one lame one. But as a unique film, I have no idea what it is.

- Interstellar. Great take on space travel. What the **** did you smoke near the end ?

- Nikita. Okay there was a warning in the form of the name Luc Besson appearing in the titles (blame yourself if you weren't attentive to such details), but still, textbook "oops we're out of reel now, any idea how to wrap it up ?".

So, do you know any movie that would have been remembered as The Best Movie Ever if a fire had broken out in the cinema at the 68th minute ?



The movie Jane Doe was a great movie for something like 20/30 minutes, where two guys are doing an autopsy on the corpse of a mysterious woman. It starts off really interseting, where all the horror is about what happened to her.

WARNING: "" spoilers below
Then there's a standard ghost in the morgue, and it all goes to hell.



The Last Broadcast:
WARNING: spoilers below
I found most of the film ambiguously menacing and I appreciated how it remained mysterious about the identity of the killer, with the director only being able to find some circumstantial evidence and nothing definitive. I was even considering calling it a great film at a couple points. But sure, at the back of my mind, I understood that a reveal was inevitable. While I would've been fine with the film not revealing if the Jersey Devil was real, I also would've been okay with the film confirming its existence or giving a strong piece of evidence that it exists. However, the twist that there was no Jersey Devil and that the director was the killer all along undermined and erased pretty much all of the ambiguous power the film built up along the way. Was the reveal surprising? Sure. It just ruined a potentially great horror film in the process.
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I think Game of Death applies, but in a different way. The plot is about an evil conglomerate exploiting Bruce Lee's image, which is something the movie does itself extremely crassly (using footage from his funeral). It tries to replicate his presence with lots of footage of body doubles imitating his fighting style, but when it produces the actual Lee fight footage at the end, you can see how much better the real thing is.


I do like the movie. If anything, that central tension is what makes it interesting.



I don't know if this qualifies for any of several reasons but we had a recent discussion about Hitchcock's Suspicion in another thread. It might be more of a "Movies with crappy endings" though.



Victim of The Night
For me, Sunshine owns this thread.
I would probably, more gently, put Inception in here too, I think, not that the third act ruins the movie but it seems like a pretty great movie (minus the Ariadne scene) and then it just becomes pretty blah. Probably would add the third act of The Dark Knight to this too.
Hmm... I bet I got a million of these, I'll have to give it some thought.



A system of cells interlinked
For me, Sunshine owns this thread.
I would probably, more gently, put Inception in here too, I think, not that the third act ruins the movie but it seems like a pretty great movie (minus the Ariadne scene) and then it just becomes pretty blah. Probably would add the third act of The Dark Knight to this too.
Hmm... I bet I got a million of these, I'll have to give it some thought.
Big fan of Sunshine, bizarre dive into slasher-ville at the end and all. Ditto on the The Dark Knight, which I think stays strong all the way until the final frame. The Dark Knight Rises is another story...

One movie that always seemed to have a weird, tacked-on final scene was the Kubrick/Spielberg film Artificial Intelligence.
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…Inception in here too, I think, not that the third act ruins the movie but it seems like a pretty great movie (minus the Ariadne scene)...
You mean
WARNING: spoilers below
the bridge
?



Victim of The Night
Big fan of Sunshine, bizarre dive into slasher-ville at the end and all. Ditto on the The Dark Knight, which I think stays strong all the way until the final frame. The Dark Knight Rises is another story...

One movie that always seemed to have a weird, tacked-on final scene was the Kubrick/Spielberg film Artificial Intelligence.
Agreed on your final point. But we'll have to agree to disagree on the others.



Victim of The Night
You mean
WARNING: spoilers below
the bridge
?
No, I just thought, as did my wife at the time, that the
WARNING: "sperlah" spoilers below
fortress in the snow
segment was just a huge letdown and really let all the air out of the film.



“Self-defeating” is a pretty great term for this. I only recently watched Premonition, having heard very bad things, and only because I was quite ill with migraines and didn’t want to sour a good film by watching it in that state.

Anyway, it didn’t seem as awful as that, perhaps because I’m a sucker for all things time-bending/time-travel. But it’s when it got to the end of it that I somewhat understood what critics meant by saying the film embodies “the worst things about time travel movies”. That really comes through when we realise
WARNING: spoilers below
the protagonist’s actions caused her husband’s accident
. It’s a groan-inducing sort of revelation, not quite a twist, but a spin on things that makes me wonder, “Why did I spend two hours of my life watching this?”. (It’s not that I expected
WARNING: spoilers below
the husband to survive/come back to life
, but even that would have been more original than what we got). That’s the feeling I get when I watch self-defeating movies in the sense that they make you wonder why you watched them. But I realise that’s not really what the thread is getting at.

Most of the movies where someone sacrifices themselves at the end. My most recent experiences with that trope were Stowaway and this week’s Blood Red Sky. Not that I don’t think sacrifice is an effective and powerful idea, I do. But the way these films use it is so cheap and boring that the whole thing begins to seem retrospectively rubbish. Don’t know if that means I’m a hyper-selfish person.



Welcome to the human race...
Don't know if I was really thinking it was great up to that point exactly but

WARNING: "Tromeo and Juliet" spoilers below
the reveal at the end that Tromeo and Juliet were biological siblings, followed by them going "f*ck it" and deciding to start a family full of inbred children anyway


was unpleasant enough to ruin the whole thing for me.

Also, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome goes downhill fast once he meets the tribe of kids.
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No, I just thought, as did my wife at the time, that the
WARNING: "sperlah" spoilers below
fortress in the snow
segment was just a huge letdown and really let all the air out of the film.
Yeah, I can see that one.



"How tall is King Kong ?"
Oh yeah, forgot about Sunshine. Why why why why why.

And yeah, Beyond Thunderdome is weird. Like two films stitched together, belonging to different genres. If I remember well, there's actually a baddie that goes all smiley and crosseyed after being hit by a frying pan. Terence Hill and Bud Spencer material. I don't dislike it, but it feels out of place.

Generally speaking, in modern ghost or possession movies there's what I'd call the Muppets threshold, near the end, when some sort of climax is needed (if possible outdoing the earlier films), and so people start flying around, being hurled to the ceiling, etc. It's generally when I start bursting with laughter, regrettably, after an hour or two of increasing tension, unease and suspense. I consider the film over by then.

In a way, it's a bit like the noisy and boring, hour-long, superpunching climax in MCU movies, but ghost movies should have more freedom than superhero movies in that respect.



Thursday Next's Avatar
I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
I kind of want to say every Dennis Villeneuve movie. I mean, I won't because I haven't actually seen every Dennis Villeneuve movie. But every time I watch one, it always starts great, it looks great, then there's some weird plot point or inauthentic character action that just makes it go off the boil a bit.



I just wrote a review for Prince of Darkness. The movie builds up a lot of clever lore, but doesn't really do anything with it other than introduce some typical horror scares.



Victim of The Night
I just wrote a review for Prince of Darkness. The movie builds up a lot of clever lore, but doesn't really do anything with it other than introduce some typical horror scares.
Yeah, I do not have good things to say about that movie. I have a couple of friends who absolutely love it and it had a lot of defenders on both RT and Corri but I wrote pretty scathing reviews of it each time I wrote it up, nearly ten years apart and going in with the best of intentions.



I thought The Tenant (1976) started out quite promising.
WARNING: "Spoiler. Sort of" spoilers below
Didn't like the way things turned toward the end. At all. I mean what a waste. I suppose that with the amount of crazy things happening there was no other possible explanation, but still. I should probably cut it some slack considering its age in its genre but I can't help thinking if you can't come up with a better way to put things together then maybe leave crazy things to those better at it. I never feel remotely as cheated watching Lynch movies. Even when I don't understand one iota of the movie.


While I didn't have the highest hopes for Desperado (1995), I thought it started out quite well with a slow building plot, nice scenery and all the right vibes for something a bit deeper than your typical blockbuster action. Halfway through and it turns into a complete cheesefest



For me, Sunshine owns this thread.
I would probably, more gently, put Inception in here too, I think, not that the third act ruins the movie but it seems like a pretty great movie (minus the Ariadne scene) and then it just becomes pretty blah. Probably would add the third act of The Dark Knight to this too.
Hmm... I bet I got a million of these, I'll have to give it some thought.
I remember also being put off by the last act in Sunshine. However, I feel that a rewatch might be kind to it. I haven't seen it since it was released.

The Dark Knight, on the other hand, I've seen multiple times and the more times I see it, the more times I'm reaffirmed that the last act is a huge mess. Not that I didn't think it was when I first saw it, but rewatches have made it stuck out more.


But anyway, my vote is for Haute Tension, which I was extremely into it until the big reveal which pretty much ruined it for me.
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