A well-executed plot twist can turn a middling movie into a good movie and a solid movie
into a great movie. But there are just as many films that focus on plot twists to the
detriment of everything else, especially when they start adding way too many twists for
one movie.
Major spoiler alert for the following films.
The ending of The Sixth Sense was strong enough to make "the Shyamalan twist" a recognizable
and anticipated moment in the writer-director's films. Unfortunately, after Unbreakable, he
started slipping when it came to the twist department.
Perhaps that was the reason the filmmaker went a bit overboard in 2004's The Village.
The film follows a group of people living a modest life in a rural village that is occasionally
beset by monsters. As it turns out, the creatures are just village elders, enacting a ritual
to encourage their younger residents to stay in the village.
But when the blind daughter of the chief elder ventures out of the village to look for medicine,
she's attacked by a real monster…one that actually turns out to be an insane fellow
villager wearing one of the monster outfits. The real twist is that once she escapes the
village, it turns out that what had appeared to be a 19th-century community was actually
just a giant LARP.
The film takes place in the modern day, and the village elders have bought and maintained
an isolated piece of land in a wildlife preserve to start a new and pure society. We don't
blame Shyamalan for trying to one-up himself in terms of twists, but he might have gone
a little bit too far on this one.
Daniel Craig has made his mark on the James Bond character with his run on the franchise.
The eagerly-awaited Spectre was meant to bring everything together, introducing fans to a
new version of fan-favorite Bond villain, Blofeld, and showcasing his ultra-powerful
and secretive organization, the titular Spectre. Unfortunately, the pressure might've been
too much for the filmmakers.
Spectre is a completely bonkers film that links together all of the previous villains
in the Craig films into being part of the titular evil organization. As if that weren't
enough, it turns out that Blofeld is actually Bond's foster brother from childhood who built
his entire evil organization for the purpose of destroying Bond, who he sees as a rival
for his father's attention.
Rather than expanding the world of the franchise, the plot twist shrinks it all down. Instead
of going on adventures and proving himself as a superspy against all manner of charismatic
supervillains, it turns out that the throughline of Craig's Bond films was just a family squabble.
With half a dozen Mission: Impossible films showcasing new and inventive ways for Tom
Cruise to nearly kill himself for our amusement, it might be hard to remember how convoluted
and confusing the first Mission: Impossible is. While later films in the franchise would
draw upon misdirection and trickery, the actual plot itself usually isn't hard to follow.
That's not the case with the first film.
"Abort! Do you read me?"
In 1996's Mission Impossible, a routine IMF operation goes wrong when Ethan is accused
of being a mole and hunted down by his own organization, a common occurrence in the franchise.
In order to clear his name, he has to break into the CIA headquarters to steal a list
of CIA cover stories that the real mole was trying to sell to an arms dealer.
So in order to find out the real mole, Ethan has to pretend to be the mole, steal the real
list to replace a fake list, then make sure the real list doesn't actually make it to
the arms dealer while also trying to stop the real mole from stealing the real list,
all while staying alive and out of jail. Simple, right? That's not even mentioning the disavowed
IMF agents, triple-agent femme fatale, and eerily realistic human face masks.
Thankfully, most of the films following stuck to simple plots and insanely complicated stunts
instead of trying to outsmart audiences with a confusing story.
Is A Simple Favor a Paul Feig comedy played extremely straight or a murder mystery drama
with over-the-top characters and plot twists? Maybe it's both. Either way, it's a movie
with a ludicrous number of insane plot twists that read like half a dozen Agatha Christie
novels were stitched together.
Anna Kendrick plays Stephanie, a mommy vlogger who falls into an increasingly intimate friendship
with Blake Lively's Emily. When Emily's body turns up a little while later, Stephanie suspects
that Emily's husband, Sean, killed his wife in order to collect on her life insurance.
That's when things totally go off the rails.
Emily's body wasn't really Emily at all. Instead, it was the body of Emily's twin sister, Faith.
Emily's real name is Hope, and she plans to pin the death of her twin on Sean as revenge
for him sleeping with Stephanie. It's all very soap opera. Ultimately, the day is saved
when a fake plan to extract a confession from Emily with a fake gun is interrupted by Emily
trying to kill Sean and Stephanie with a real gun, which is then interrupted by a SWAT team
that was watching the events happen on Stephanie's mommy vlog live stream. Simple!
"I can't keep track of any of it anymore!"
Twists and turns are part and parcel of the mystery genre, but A Simple Favor just feels
convoluted by the time the credits roll.
When a movie is packed to the brim with beloved actors, it could end up like a Coen brothers
film...or you could get Collateral Beauty. Sure, it stars an absurd number of gifted
actors like Keira Knightley, Helen Mirren, Kate Winslet, Edward Norton, and Will Smith.
But despite the on-screen talent, this movie is out of its mind.
So what's this star-studded film all about? Well, the story follows Howard, an advertising
executive who lost his daughter to a tragic accident years earlier. Ever since, he's been
writing letters to the abstract concepts of Love, Time, and Death. Meanwhile, his crooked
business partners and estranged friends discover this habit and hire actors to portray the
three abstract concepts. Why? They want to film Howard talking to them, erase the actors
digitally, and then submit the recording to prove that Howard is unfit to lead the company
that they all work at.
Meanwhile, Howard befriends a divorcée whose own daughter died suddenly. By the end of
the film, she turns out to have been Howard's actual wife, and the two have been treating
each other as strangers for the whole time for some bizarre reason. In the end, Howard
does actually leave the company when his estranged friends' plan is implemented perfectly, but
he forgives them because they were doing it to help him. Oh, and the actors playing Love,
Time, and Death actually are the personifications of Love, Time, and Death, who decided to help
Howard and his friends learn to love again. Talk about a head trip.
Even if you enjoy predicting plot twists before they happen, chances are good you won't be
able to guess the old "secret Nazi diamond" one until after watching Inside Man.
"Pay strict attention to what I'm going to say, because I choose my words carefully,
and I never repeat myself."
The film focuses on a bank heist and the hostage negotiator trying to keep the crooks from
killing any of the regular people trapped inside the bank with them. And as it turns
out, the entire robbery is fake, or at the very least, the bad guys' weapons are. And
after the cops mix up who's a hostage and who's a robber, it doesn't seem like anything
was actually stolen.
But then there's the twist, the bank robbers built an entire fake wall in the vault for
the ringleader to wait inside until the cops leave, so he can steal some Nazi diamonds
that have been sitting inside the bank since World War II. While whodunits can be a lot
of fun, Inside Man is more of a whydunit or a howdunit. How did no one notice the fake
wall? Why did the thieving mastermind do all this to enlighten one enterprising hostage
negotiator about Nazi shenanigans? Who's checking to make sure any of this makes sense?
Nicolas Cage is known to audiences as a wild actor that can be hard to understand. But
despite his crazy reputation, his movies are generally pretty well-constructed and even-keeled…mostly.
That isn't the case with Knowing, a film about how Cage's astrophysicist character is the
only one who can stop a global extinction event. After his son discovers a series of
numbers buried in a time capsule that correspond to various disasters in history, Cage notices
the numbers also predict disasters that haven't happened yet. Worse, one disaster promises
to wipe out the entire planet.
Nicolas Cage using math to save the planet from global extinction is a fine premise on
its own, but that's before Knowing hits its stride. Throughout the film, mysterious strangers
have been following Cage's son, and it turns out they're actually aliens gathering up the
world's children to take them to another planet for some reason. Cage's character is left
alone on the planet to die as every living organism is reduced to ashes by a solar flare.
What does it all mean? Math is useless.
J.J. Abrams' Star Trek reinvigorated the flagging franchise with an updated aesthetic, a young
new cast, and a convenient explanation about how it's a parallel story to the original
Star Trek television show instead of simply being a reboot. Following that success, audiences
everywhere were eager to see what the sequel would do with the newly fertile story space.
As it turns out, Star Trek: Into Darkness was basically just a remake of Star Trek II:
The Wrath of Khan, despite many interviews from the filmmakers denying it beforehand,
to the point that Abrams publicly regrets the secrecy.
Benedict Cumberbatch playing Khan might be too much for many fans, but things get even
worse when Captain James T. Kirk sacrifices himself to save his crew in a nearly identical,
inverted shot from Star Trek II, where the original Spock also takes one for the team.
"KHAAAAAAAN!"
However, while the original Star Trek films at least waited for a sequel to bring back
Spock, Kirk is up and blasting the Beastie Boys again by the end of Into Darkness, thanks
to a fortuitous blood infusion from Khan's life-saving body juice. In other words, just
watch Wrath of Khan instead of this darkness.
Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Part 2 holds the fewest plot twists here, but that's just because
the filmmakers only needed one to cross the line into "too many" territory. The story
of the films are simple: human Bella Swan is enamored with her vampire boyfriend Edward
and wants to marry him and become a vampire, in that order. By the time Breaking Dawn rolls
around, Bella is newly turned and forced to team up with her vampire-in-laws to battle
against a secret vampire society that wants to kill her half-vampire baby. That's when
things go off the rails.
Bella, her vampire family, her werewolf friends, and the evil vampire society start killing
each other in increasingly violent ways. It's a frenetic turbine of CGI carnage that ends
with most of the fan-favorite characters dead. It's also a complete fabrication, a psychic
vision from one of the superpowered vampires to show what would have gone down had the
battle actually happened.
For mega-fans of the book, it likely left them tense in their seats. For everyone else,
the revelation that it was all a dream probably left them scratching their heads. Either way,
one plot twist was one too many.
If you heard anything about Netflix's original horror movie, The Perfection, chances are
good you were encouraged to go in as ill-informed as possible. That's because the film has so
many twists that part of the pleasure of it is feeling unsure of what the actual story
is about…and partly because it doesn't really hold together by the end.
True, the film starts simply enough. Charlotte, a former cellist prodigy, is forced to hang
up her bow to take care of an ailing mother. In turn, her former mentors have found a replacement
in Lizzie. That's when things get weird.
Lizzie seems to get infected by an earlier-foreshadowed flu, which eventually culminates in her vomiting
up wriggling maggots and chopping off her own arm to stop the bugs inside her body from
devouring her. But actually, the entire sequence was engineered by Charlotte, who drugged Lizzie
in order to ruin the younger woman's musical career.
"Pharmacy is open for business."
"What is that, hair of the dog?"
"It's the best cure."
In yet another twist, it turns out that Charlotte had good intentions. She was trying to help
Lizzie escape a life of musical domination and sexual violence at the hands of their
shared mentor. It also turns out that Lizzie thinks it's worth the pain in order to truly
excel as a musician. But wait, we're not done yet. It then actually turns out that she and
Charlotte engineered it all to trap their former teacher, chop off his arms and legs,
and play a duet together. When a film is almost too confusing to summarize, you know you've
got too many plot twists.
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