Plot Twists That Went Too Far

Properly executed, a good plot twist is the icing on an already delicious cake, a colorful and exciting treat that may very well end up being the part you remember most. But in that execution lies a delicate balance. Make the twist too outrageous or build an entire movie around nothing but twists, and you're handing audiences a cake that's pure icing. Sure, it may taste good at first, but it will soon give them a headache, and afterwards, everyone involved will end up regretting the whole thing.

Let's talk now about movies that just didn't know when to stop piling it on. Look, there have been a lot of movies. Audiences are jaded. The temptation to throw in a big memorable plot twist to set your film apart from the pack must be overwhelming. But this is an advanced maneuver, and even for otherwise seasoned filmmakers at the peak of their craft, big ostentatious reveals don't always work out, and they can sometimes ruin an otherwise good movie.

Then again, including a truly outrageous plot twist in your film is a sure-fire way to get the internet talking about it, so maybe these twists are doing exactly as their creators intended. After all, we're talking about them, right? These are our picks for plot twists that went just a little too far.

With a little more restraint, "Now You See Me" could have easily been a fun, glamorous crime romp à la "Ocean's Eleven" or "Catch Me If You Can." However, much like a stage magician, "Now You See Me" views metaphorical restraint the same way it views actual physical restraints — as an obstacle to be overcome in an intentionally unbelievable fashion.

The film is a globetrotting cat-and-mouse chase between FBI investigator Dylan Rhodes and a group of Robin Hood-esque criminal stage magicians called the Four Horseman. That premise alone could be more than enough for a cool heist film, but this movie just doesn't know when to quit. Layered on top of that, Rhodes discovers that the Horsemen have ties to an actual ancient order of wizards called The Eye with actual real magic powers.

But that's not all. The final twist is that, although Rhodes has been apparently attempting to catch the Horsemen, he's secretly their leader and a member of The Eye. Presumably, Dylan's entire multi-decade FBI career was all a long con so that he could serve as the group's inside man for a single heist, an idea so inconceivably elaborate that it completely shatters the reality of the film, even more than the actual magic does. In the end, our advice to the Horsemen is the same as our advice to the writers of this film: There was probably a simpler way you could have accomplished your goals.

For the bulk of its runtime, 2010's "Remember Me" is a fairly standard romantic comedy drama. When troubled college student Tyler Hawkins (Robert Pattinson) is arrested for getting in a fight, he comes up with a plan to get back at the detective who arrested him. After learning that the detective has a daughter around Tyler's age named Ally (Emilie de Ravin), Tyler decides to start dating her so that he can eventually brutally dump her as revenge.

If you've seen a movie before, you know what happens next. Tyler and Ally end up falling in love for real. Ally discover's Tyler's secret, and they break up. Tyler apologizes, and they get back together. If the film ended there, it would've probably been regarded by critics as a middling yet ultimately forgettable endeavor. However, a horrible last-minute plot twist ensured that "Remember Me" will indeed be remembered forever, for good and for ill.

At the end of the film, while Tyler is visiting his father's office, the film reveals that this office building is, in fact, the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and the date is September 11, 2001. Tyler is then killed when the building is destroyed by a terrorist attack. Perhaps in a better film, this could have worked. But this is not that film. Instead, most critics agreed that this plot twist just came across as a crass exploitation of a real-life tragedy that the film didn't even come close to earning.

Released in 2019, "Serenity" tells the story of Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey), a boat captain who lives on the remote Plymouth Island. He spends his days trying to hunt down and catch an elusive giant fish named Justice. One day, Dill's ex-wife, Karen (Anne Hathaway), shows up and presents him with an offer. She suspects her husband, Frank (Jason Clarke), is abusing their son, the quiet and introverted Patrick (Rafael Sayegh). Frank plans to visiting Plymouth Island soon, so Karen offers Dill $10 million if he takes Frank out on a fishing trip and ensures that he never returns.

Here's the twist: Plymouth Island doesn't actually exist. This world is actually a realistic video game that was created by — and is being played by — our true protagonist, Patrick. Patrick's real father died a decade earlier, and Baker Dill is a fictionalized version of Patrick's dad that Patrick is using to enact a cathartic fantasy of murdering his stepfather. When Dill finally does decide to kill Frank within the game, Patrick similarly works up the courage to kill Frank in the real world and stabs him with a knife.

Got it? Us neither! "Serenity" is a total mess. It seems like it was written by someone who's never played a video game and may also be a space alien, though to be fair, there's some joy to be had in its utterly incoherent delirium.

"Orphan" tells the story of Kate and John Coleman (Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard), a couple who adopt a child named Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) from a local orphanage. Though at first their new daughter seems sweet and innocent, the Colemans eventually begin to suspect that Esther might have a dark side. For its first two acts, "Orphan" is a fairly competent execution of the classic "evil child" horror film. And then it goes completely off the rails in act three.

Throughout the film, Esther seems to have a surprising amount of knowledge of — and interest in — sex, despite being ostensibly nine years old. This culminates with Esther unsuccessfully attempting to seduce her father, John, which causes him and Kate to start digging into Esther's past. Then they learn the truth. Esther isn't a child, she's a 33-year-old woman with a condition called hypopituitarism, which stunted her growth. She uses her childlike appearance to take advantage of people, and she's also a violent murderer.

A wide array of people found the film's plot deeply offensive for multiple different reasons. Some took issue with the way that the film depicted hypopituitarism, a real-life condition that the film grossly misrepresents. Adoption groups also denounced the film for similarly obvious reasons. The backlash was so strong that the home video release of the film even felt the need to include a pro-adoption message on the disc as a way to hopefully counteract its toxic narrative.

"Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" opens with a montage of news headlines, telling us that evil wizard Gellert Grindelwald is still at large and could be anywhere. (Remember this for later.) Then the film proper begins. Our hero, Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), is a magizoologist who's just arrived in New York City in 1926 with a magical suitcase full of rare magical creatures. Scamander soon runs afoul of Percival Graves (Colin Farrell), a high-ranking official in the magical government of the US. Graves asserts that one of Scamander's creatures is responsible for the death of a local politician, but in truth, Graves is attempting to frame Scamander to cover up his own crimes.

Once Graves is exposed and defeated, Scamander discovers that Graves has magically disguised his appearance. After dispelling this magic, Scamander reveals that Percival Graves is actually — in a shockingly underwhelming twist — Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp).

To be fair, Grindelwald is an important figure in larger "Harry Potter" lore, but up until that moment, within this particular story, he does not matter at all. Sure, we technically get a bit of a tease about Grindelwald at the beginning, but he's barely mentioned throughout the rest of the film, and when he finally appears, to be honest, we've totally forgotten about him. Some die-hard "Harry Potter" fans may have found the presence of Grindelwald to be a cool reveal, but everyone else was just scratching their heads in confusion.

These days, it's not unusual for a superhero movie or TV show to address the question of what would happen if a superhero was also an a******. Thanks to the films of the DC Extended Universe, even Superman isn't immune from that type of characterization anymore. But when "Hancock" was released in 2008, it felt like a novel conceit to build a movie around — never mind that superhero movies in general were still not quite an entire industry unto themselves at that point.

And that aspect of "Hancock" works wonderfully, helped along by the titular character being portrayed by Will Smith, who is clearly enjoying the chance to play against type and not be his usual good-hearted hero with everyone's best interests at heart. Also effective is the first big twist of the movie, in which it's revealed that Charlize Theron's character also secretly has powers comparable to Hancock's. 

But then everything falls apart when the movie decides one twist wasn't enough and tacks on a second one: That the two lead characters are actually 3,000-year-old immortal beings who are the last of their kind, and also can't help but fall in love — but then lose their powers whenever they do. It really does feel like part of an entirely different movie that was grafted onto this one, and ruins what was otherwise a fun, unique twist on the superhero movie genre.  

The original "Oldboy" was a 2003 action thriller masterpiece from South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook. It also ends with a succession of plot twists that feel like one gut punch after another, until you're left reeling by the time the end credits roll. When it was announced that Spike Lee would be doing an American remake of "Oldboy," one of the first things that fans of the original movie wondered was how the plot twists would be handled. After all, they deal with not one but two different examples of incest — one involving siblings, and one involving a father and his daughter. 

On one hand, it's refreshing that the "Oldboy" remake didn't sanitize the twists, as they are integral to the plot of the movie and the way everything is resolved. On the other hand, the decision to take the twists even further just cheapened the whole thing. While the original revealed that the main antagonist had had a sexual relationship with his sister, the remake's antagonist (Sharlto Copley) not only had that same relationship with his sister, but both siblings also had it with their father. There is a delicate balance with this type of thing, and bringing the twist to that next level completely shattered that balance and made it shocking just for the sake of being shocking — a feeling the original didn't elicit. 

Tyler Perry's bread and butter is crowd-pleasing message movies. Typically, those messages fall along the lines of "family is everything" or "don't let anyone get in the way of your dreams." In the case of Perry's "Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor," that message isn't quite as positive or uplifting. In fact, it's downright offensive when you take a closer look at it.

The plot of "Temptation" is that the titular marriage counselor, Judith (Jurnee Smollett-Bell), ends up having an affair with one of her business colleagues. The movie goes through most of the typical motions of a story like this: stolen glances lead to steamy encounters between people who are being unfaithful, until eventually their lies catch up with them. Anger and heartbreak ensues. Cheaters dealing with the consequences of their actions is one thing, but it's in the nature of one of those consequences that things take a gross turn.

It is revealed that Judith has contracted HIV from the man she was having an affair with. The movie ends with her alone and picking up her HIV medicine when she bumps into her ex, who has remarried and had a child. More than one critic pointed out that the whole thing smacks of Judith "deserving" to get HIV because of her sinful ways, which perpetuates a very harmful stigma that HIV and AIDS are just nature's way of punishing promiscuous behavior. 

In the original "Ocean's Eleven" — well, the original as in the 2001 movie, not the actual original from 1960 — Julia Roberts plays Tess, ex-wife of Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and the woman whose affection Danny robs an entire casino just to win back. In follow-up "Ocean's Twelve," it is revealed that Julia Roberts herself actually exists within the universe of the movies. And, wouldn't you know it, Tess happens to look an awful lot like Julia Roberts, a fact which is exploited as part of the heist driving the film.

Writer George Nolfi and director Steven Soderbergh no doubt thought they were being very clever and very meta by having Roberts play both Tess and herself in "Ocean's Twelve." But it just ends up feeling like Soderbergh's love for being able to gather A-list celebrities and getting them to act silly run amok. Thankfully, we don't ever see Tess and Roberts in the same place, though they do talk to each other on the phone, which is more than enough. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus for "Ocean's Twelve" calls it "self-satisfied and illogical," and much of that certainly stems from hanging so much of this impressively star-studded movie on Julia Roberts playing two characters, one of which is herself. 

"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" got a lot of grief for a lot of reasons. There's the whole "nuking the fridge" thing, of course, which was so maligned that some suggested that the term should replace "jumping the shark" to describe the moment that a franchise takes a turn for the worst. And then there's the twist at the end that aliens were behind the whole thing, and very much exist in the universe of "Indiana Jones."

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas justified having aliens be the crux of "Crystal Skull" because pop culture was all about UFOs in the 1950s, when the movie was set. And that's fine. It's also fine that there is a fair bit of magical realism in the movie, as that's always been part of the franchise — something that a lot of people seem to forget. The third movie ended with Indy (Harrison Ford) finding the actual, functioning Holy Grail, after all. 

No, where things go too far in the finale of "Crystal Skull" is in actually showing not only the aliens but a UFO rising up from the ruins and zooming off into space. Beyond the special effects being strangely lackluster for a Spielberg-Lucas production, there's just something to be said for telling and not showing when it comes to that type of thing.

When discussing movies with bad endings, movies with twists gone awry, or any other examples of a movie ending on a laughably terrible note, it's impossible not to bring up Tim Burton's 2001 remake of "Planet of the Apes." While Burton's film output has been wildly inconsistent for many years now, his name was still considered an automatic mark of quality when "Planet of the Apes" was released. Up to that point, he hadn't yet made anything approaching a bad movie. But "Planet of the Apes" changed all that.

The one thing that the movie did decently is that it was pretty good at marrying what were then-cutting edge visuals and makeup effects with the same cheesy B-movie spirit of the original "Apes" films. But whatever affection anyone might have mustered for the movie completely went out the window with a twist ending that tried to subvert the original's "it was Earth all along!" reveal but fell on its face in the process. 

That is, if you can even fully decipher it. There's something about another planet and time travel and changing earth's history yadda yadda yadda. It's a ridiculous mess, capped off by an image that wants to be powerful but ends up one of the most nonsensical in the history of film — the Lincoln Memorial, with Lincoln looking like an ape. Oof.