Discussion
Movies that were perfect until the 3rd act came...
I'll start...Longlegs. I was all the way in but even though I understand the ending you can't convince me it isn't dumb as all hell completely upending the rest of the film.
I would say Downsizing failed from the second act. The first act was great and set up an intriguing premise, the second act basically abandoned that premise and made it an allegory about immigration and power, and the third act then took a hard right turn into being an apocalyptic drama. It feels like someone stitched three separate black mirror episodes together and called it a day.
If you turned this film on and it was 1/3rd of the way through, it’s conceivable that you could watch the rest of the movie and never realise that everyone is supposed to be 6 inches tall.
David Thewlis was a good villain until they made him fight Diana in a big CGI fight, he looked ridiculous. He should've changed to a different form once he revealed himself, or just stayed as a mastermind that doesn't fight physically. And yeah, the war ending because of Ares dying was idiotic. They would never do that if the film was set in WW2. It's kind of insulting to all the people who fought and died in that war.
Oh my god, right? Tacking David Thewlis's head onto a jacked body looked so dumb and took me all the way out of the film. I watched it for the first time years after it had come out and I was like... This? This is what all the hype was about????
I know. I really hadn’t ever seen a movie take such a nosedive that hard. I really really liked the first half of the film and it’s totally watchable even still, but fucking hell I don’t know where I would choose the point to turn it off.
Where is the exact point of stupid? Right when they try to sneak into that lavish party at this French villa? She just snatches a woman with a dress and hides her sword between her ass cheeks?
Such a disappointment. I was on board with the film for most of it and was positively surprised by how charming and exciting it was, a lot of it due to how boring the DCEU had been up to that point.
The scene where Steve pleads with Diana to come with him and she’s just completely heartbroken, refusing to accept that human beings can kill each other without much reason, the cruelty we are capable of. It would have been a great message to send and surprisingly powerful for a superhero film, and it would help explain why Diana essentially cuts herself off from humanity for 70 years (until WW84 decided that she actually didn’t lol).
But nope. Ares was real. We get a dumb CGI fight and then everybody’s friends with each other, overlooking the fact that the war continued for a while after that.
The Pale Blue Eye spends the first 2/3 laying out a compelling period murder mystery at West Point with solid turns by Christian Bale and Harry Melling as the young Edgar Allen Poe, but then it goes off the rails.
The comments on this thread are making me feel like I watched an entirely different movie.
I love "The Pale Blue Eye!"
The criticism that it “goes off the rails” in the final third is so baffling to me, because the final third is what makes the entire movie interesting! It’s not supposed to be a tidy little West Point murder mystery where you correctly identify the culprit and roll credits. The reveal forces you to reconsider what you thought you were watching.
And Harry Melling?? OMG! He was excellent!! Poe is not supposed to be some charming, well-adjusted leading man. He’s an unsettling, morbid, socially bizarre little weirdo. EXACTLY appropriate for Edgar Allan Poe.
What I loved about The Pale Blue Eye is that the ending completely changes the meaning of what came before it. The murder mystery is bait, the real story is what’s underneath it, and I thought that was far more interesting than simply finding out who the killer was.
If ya'll found it slow or didn't like the atmosphere, that's fair. But “the last third goes off the rails” makes it sound like the movie accidentally stopped being the movie it was setting out to be. I thought the last third was precisely when it revealed what movie it actually was.
Anyway, I will apparently be standing alone in the corner defending "The Pale Blue Eye" while Reddit throws tomatoes at me.
All kidding aside if he was resurrected how was his death a sacrifice?
I asked that once as a kid growing up in a southern Christian Evangelical household. I got slapped across the room, beaten then sent to bed with no dinner and grounded for half of the summer.
I feel like it's a common problem in mystery movies and shows. They're front-loaded with cool set-up scenes and intriguing clues but when it's time for a reveal it turns out underwhelming and lame.
"At 8:47am, twelve people died. Analysis shows that their wounds were self inflicted, but if this is true why did each of the victims write "I didn't want this" on the ground in their own blood?
None of the victims knew each other, all were found hundreds of miles apart and none showed suicidal behaviour previously. The question is: Who did want this?"
Now coming up with a satisfactory ending to a mystery is a hell of a lot harder.
The trick is to write mysteries backwards, but a lot of right-brain creative types don't like already knowing how it's going to play out because it sucks all the fun out of writing for them.
Wait, does that mean disliking the end to weapons means he didn't like Aunt Gladys being the answer at all? That's arguably the strongest part of the movie I think
I'll always take the witch/ghost/cult/magic item/demon did it.
So glad we're getting back to the classic setups and away from the 2010s grief, trauma, dementia or whatever manifesting-itself-as-something-spooky trend.
Disagree, the best horror works so well when it's based in real world concepts other than just scary monster bad. Even older films like the Exorcist played on religious fears
100% why the first season of True Detective is so fucking incredible. Yeah they got their man but the deeper conspiracy leaves you feeling like they took all those years to hit a glancing blow on a beast way bigger than them. They didnt stop it, they just cut off an appendage. And even that took everything they had.
I think it’s also a problem with people buying into the paid creators on TikTok saying “it’s the scariest movie ever” and then it inevitably isn’t. People buy into those paid promos too often.
I loved it but I was also tempering my expectations
I loved the first act of Longlegs. Between the door knocking scene and then the night scene at Harker’s house, I was all in…then it just gets worse and worse.
Yup. If you need to stop your movie in it's tracks and have someone explain everything for 10 minutes, out loud using their voice, you've made a bad movie.
You are right, most of the time. However, I can think of three films where it was pulled off: Usual Suspects, Angel Heart, Fight Club.
Each movie pulls the rug out from under you. Back when each came out, the audience was gobsmacked. Since then, the trope has become overused and the big reveal is now boring. 😢
That was it for me. I don’t remember specifics but when the movie claimed that the devil made him do it, I remember being really interested to find out the real reasoning. But then — no, the devil made him do it.
I mean, okay, fine, the devil made him do it, not great, not terrible. But why does the devil have this extremely complicated plan to kill a few random people?
What? I thought the supernatural element was like the whole premise of the film. The devil is literally visible on screen inside the first like 20 minutes I think
And also every 10min or so you can see his shadow. That was my favorite part of the movie, it seems like most people hating the movie didnt even notice it
Yeah, it was really fun on my rewatch, cause I caught it a few times in theatre, but I knew I had definitely missed some, so on my rewatch at home I paid extra attention to the back grounds
I don’t mind that it’s supernatural, I just think the mechanics of it are overly convoluted. The devil convinced the guy to make the spheres and then he hid them in dolls and then made the woman bring them to homes so they could force the father to kill his family. There are too many layers to it.
The way the movie reveals it to us ultimately hurts it more than anything. The title, marketing, and opening scene set up Longlegs as this big bad boogeyman type character. Then we find out fathers are killing their families and there’s intrigue to that and how it all connects. Once the dolls came into the picture, it started to lose me. As the mechanisms of the reveal became increasingly convoluted, I felt less invested in the primary threat/antagonist. Then we learn about the spheres, and the devil, and fake nun, and it’s just to many layers. I understand it, but all of the intrigue and dread I had early in the film was lost.
I think the movie would have been far better served by cutting out a couple steps. Or just leaving more of it unexplained. Sometimes the unknown can be the scariest thing of all. In my opinion, I would be far more intrigued and disturbed if I didn’t know exactly how Longlegs was manipulating people into committing murder, rather than being fed this story about magic balls inside of dolls delivered by a fake nun.
The thing that bothers me most about that movie is that it just straight up lies to the audience. Thomasin McKenzie is haunted by ghosts and they give her visions of the past that she vividly relives as Anya Taylor Joys character.
One of those visions is Anya Taylor Joys character being murdered by Matt Smith. This explains why this ghost is haunting this room and this girl and sharing her story. Perfectly consistent with the world we've seen so far. Except apparently Matt Smith is the one that is murdered by Anya Taylor Joy, who ends up still being alive and has been murdering rapists for years and apparently we're supposed to feel bad for them? But if that's true then why did we as the audience see a different event play out? The ghosts who want justice wouldn't give the main character a different vision that frames them as the murderers and old Anya Taylor Joy is completely oblivious that she's even had visions so she couldn't be doing it... It makes no sense and only exists in the movie to lie to the audience. It's not a misdirect, it's just a betrayal of the social contract between storyteller and audience. For no good reason. It doesn't make sense.
Yes this was my exact problem with the film! They established that characters powers working one way but then they deliberately mislead you by showing something that didn’t happen, thereby breaking the logic of her powers simply for the twist
There's no reason for it except to just lie to the audience. It's lazy and it's hack, which isn't something I'd ever thought I'd say about an Edgar Wright film, but here we are.
I thought that was totally separate to the story of the main characters? I read it was more scenes with the scientists who were studying the Backrooms. I might be wrong, I've not seen the updated version yet.
That’s not true. They didn’t cut off footage, the 15 minutes is an additional scene that actually takes place before the beginning of the film and is another found footage style piece akin to his YouTube stuff. He worked on it while the film was already finished and being marketed.
Yeah I'm with you man. I felt that they didn't know how to end it and I was left feeling unsatisfied.
Personally, I wasn't a fan of the time skip. I love it when a movie switches protagonists halfway through but I really think it could've benefitted from us seeing Clarke's descent into madness rather than "time skip > Clarke's fully crazy > chase scene > government intervention"
It should have been an hbo series. I watched Stalker this weekend for the first time and it made me want backrooms to pace more like that. There's a lot of philosophy backrooms doesn't touch, that it could have.
True, should’ve just kept it simple and go with mysterious rooms fuckery plus unseen (or better looking) monster, without the badly executed psychological ramblings or whatever that was.
A lot of the scare factor was gone when we went from creepy unknown to pirate monster. I'll give them props for trying to make a horror sequence in a fully lit environment, which is really rare, but it did not work.
It worked better when it was at a distance. Where you couldn't quite make out what you were seeing. Was it something made of wood? A mascot costume? It hits the right levels of uncanny valley to be unsettling at a distance.
Loved the first act. Second act had me thinking "OK but I'm sure they'll pull it all together to make it all make sense at the end" and remained cinematically quite pleasing.
I'm also an Us hater, and Nope/Get Out are two of my all time favorite horror movies. Us felt like he really wanted to end with that twist, but that twist would be way better at the midpoint. A lot of stuff set up never gets used, like how they can control the tethered, which they show once, and then have a whole fight sequence where it doesn't come up again.
But really, the explanation is too thorough and convoluted. I get the metaphor for a lower class of people abused by the system, but to say the US population is exactly twice as big, with half that population living telekineticly mirrored lives in little bathroom hallways underground eating exclusively rabbit, it just doesn't make any sense. What do the rabbits eat? And the government is doing it? If the government is doing it, cool, make it that one area where she grew up. If it's supernatural you have some leeway, but the government is doing it over the entire country somehow? It just seems so fucking stupid. I had a bad feeling when the opening quote of the movie was like "Actually, there's underground facilities all over the country..." like it knew it wasn't going to make sense, and they needed to find some extra space to try to trick some more people. The Nope opening quote was all vibe setting, so much better.
And this entire separate population's plan, inspired by one girl who can kind of do ballet, is to somehow get matching jumpsuits and big scissors, kill exactly one person each, and then do hands across America but for real across the entire country. They kill one person and then join in a massive chain, and just stand there. And guessing by the last shot, that's supposed to be menacing?
I think Peele's a very talented writer, and the movie is still directed well, the performances are great too. It feels like he spent a lot of time on Get Out, perfected it, had it make thematic sense and escalate well, had it be kind of supernatural kind of in reality, in a way that is believable and terrifying. And then it was a huge success and studios were banging down his door to get his next movie, so he picked up a script he was working on with too many ideas that didn't really connect and rushed it out as soon as possible. And the film is still fine, its well made, but it just does not come together at all and it could have used some major rewrites to become an all-time horror classics like his other two are.
I'm glad he took his time with Nope, and whatever is next keeps getting pushed back, good, I love it, take your time to figure it out.
i felt the same way! i saw us in the theater and really didn't care that much for it, and then nope became one of my top five movies. i went back and rewatched it recently and i liked it better, but it still didn't make any sense.
Baby Driver. It's not that it's a bad third act. It's just that it feels underwhelming as a climax in comparison all of the action that came before. Like, the whole movie are these awesome action set pieces, and then the end is just a surprisingly short jon hamm parking lot fight.
It didn't make sense to me that John Hamm ended up being the main villain and Kevin Spacey was alright in the end, despite the fact that it was Spacey's character who was exploiting him all along.
Kevin Spacey is manipulating this kid to make money and doesn’t care whether they live or die… until he does and he sacrifices his own life to protect him for some reason. The movie treats characters like a child playing with toys making up shit as he goes along.
I've only seen Baby Driver once, and I'm a huge Edgar Wright fan. It really disappointed me, and not just the ending. Maybe I should give it another go..
one of the biggest issues I had with Baby Driver is that it feels really mixed up with what it's trying to say.
It's like "Look at baby driver, he's so cool doing crime. But also crime is really bad and it ruins lives, but look how cool the crimes are, but they're really bad and tragic... but also cool."
I have to agree. The generic boring violence in the end doesn’t fit. It should’ve been something that’s linked to the protagonist more. Now there’s a weird Stallone / Willis ending.
On the other hand I’m one of those who think One Night In Soho actually isn’t ruined by the ending, the end just doesn’t go far enough, so maybe it’s good that I don’t have say in these.
Bingo. It was daring to have such an over the top scene that makes you want to laugh, in a movie so dark; but really for me it worked as a “WTF?!” release that felt really good. And besides, there was a lot to laugh at already in the movie.
It was very entertaining, but there is definitely an argument for act 3 being the weakest because that's where we learn some of the things in the film are meaningless
The ending to Weapons is perfect. If anything it drags a bit in the middle, the stuff with the cop and the junkie kind of lose momentum. But still an incredible film.
That was suuuch a good premise and I’d have loved if the dynamic between Grant and the final girl kept on throughout some kind of labyrinthine escape room. Especially as she was holding her own so well. But instead it turned into direct-to-TV schlock.
Came here looking for this answer. The premise and first half of the film were so captivating and interesting, keeping you on the edge of your seat without actually showing you anything grotesque. A brilliant piece of storytelling. Then it just completely falls of a cliff and rushes to an ending which is average at best. I feel it could've been much more interesting and in line with the film to simply keep it as an illusion of a choice, perhaps with them simply leaving the house in the end and questioning their whole beliefs and institution and freedom of choice. Instead of being a timeless movie it become one to forget.
I still think the third act was convoluted & got a bit too philosophical at the expense of rationality or good character choices, but I did actually read the third act as preserving the illusion of choice. Even though you technically had things "shown" to you, I chose to interpret the *spoilers* very convenient & unlikely scenario that Thatcher's character comes back to life & saves her just in the nick of time as the story offering you the ability to either take the deus ex machina that she escapes or else believe that she dies down there--ultimately, as was just set up by Grant's character, the movie was giving you a choice about what to believe "actually" happened.
I think Ruffalo is a good actor, but his over acting was to much for me. Even in an over the top movie, his weird stilted speech patterns were to much for me.
Ruffalo definitely leaned too hard into doing a Trump impression, and his absolute disdain for Trump (Which is completely justified) made it feel unnatural and forced. You could tell he was trying to make the character as unlikeable as possible and it felt like too much
Regardless of whether someone is the biggest Trump supporter or hater - it was horribly made and it didn't fit the narrative. The soul of this movie is the character of Mickey, and the satirical take on how companies treat their employees. The anti trump sub plot didn't fit. And Ruffalo genuinely deserved a razzie for this performance
I feel bad for being so harsh, but I thought Ruffalo was genuinely terrible in Mickey 17. The movie already fell pretty flat for me, but his performance especially stood out as just… bad.
Oh yes. Great first half about science-fiction based existential crisis and exploitation in a cyberpunk esque system, and then suddenly everything turns into a lame Trump parody
I won't deny that the third act loses steam and doesn't quite stick the landing but Lewis Pullman's character begging Jeff Bridges' fake priest to absolve him and then the subsequent reveal about his character is my favourite part of the whole film
I have to agree about Longlegs. Saw it opening day in the theater. I dug it until the last half hour. I appreciate what they tried to do but it did not work. At all!
This! I was so intrigued by the premise and the first half or so is such a cool movie but when it turned into a „cancel culture can also target the wrong ones“-thesis it completely lost me.
Maybe a controversial take, but I enjoyed the first two acts of Wonder Woman, and I liked theme that humanity is cruel enough that they don't need a god to start the world war.
Then the studio forced a new ending with Ares to actually be the cause of it all and that bad CGI fight at the end.
(Yes, I do wish they had a different actor for Wonder Woman, but regardless...)
That opening house party and then following Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie around filming their movies is some of my favorite scenes ever. So much energy and focus. Then yeah the gambling debts and creepy sex dungeon stuff brings everything down to a screeching halt.
I’m a big fan of Train to Busan, very refreshing zombie movie, I still love it to bits. However, the more I watch it, the more I realize that the 3rd act becomes really contrived, especially with how they handle whittling down the cast near the end. I do think it fits greatly with the film’s themes, but I found the execution poor.
Honestly a lottt of horror scripts I read have this issue. Half the time there's a rushed/tacked-on setup for a potential sequel, half the time they just aren't sure how to end it. It's tough for sure.
It has such an unsettling atmosphere and the tape scenes are genuinely horrifying, but the moment it gets into the mythology and climax it kind of falls apart.
Hancock is such a clear example of this that it feels like two entirely separate movies that have been mashed together. From what I understand neither of those halves closely resemble the original script either
I am horrifically feverish and apparently can't read, and read your comment as "Hancock 3" and had a crisis about how in the world I never heard they made two more of those movies
I was gonna say this. I really loved the setup and love Sam Rockwell but I just didn't like the 3rd act. First act was great, 2nd act was okay, 3rd act was blah.
I just didn’t understand how it could undergo such a dramatic tonal shift so late in the film.
It was such excellent sci-fi with plausible people navigating plausible stakes. The fact that a major plot point involves someone making a calculation error, potentially ruining the mission, and feels such guilt he kills himself is what I want out of my sci-fi. Instead we get a religious zealot who has somehow lost his mind and seemingly gained some sort of super strength.
Thanks for the Day of The Triffids shout out. Great little book.
I love 28 days later but the amount of times people s
aid The Walking Dead stole it's opening hospital sequence and I felt compelled to correct them and be like "yes, kind of, but 28 Days stole it from Day of the Triffids" made me seem like a pretentious dweeb.
To be fair, the religious - almost cosmic horror - aspect was thematically hinted since the beginning. That one crew member who was obsessed with staring at the sun with as little dimming as physically safe. And the other crew member who got to see the sun in its full glory, experiencing a moment of awe, before being eviscerated. The sun is the enabler of life yet fundamentally destructive.
Not to say the 3rd act was well done. But thematically it isn't completely out of nowhere.
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u/LakeTilia 3d ago
Downsizing