That’s what happens in No Way Out, director Roger Donaldson’s gripping 1987 thriller, which plays out as a love triangle mystery, with Gene Hackman escaping blame for the murder of his lover and Kevin Costner investigating that murder, in which he is also implicated. But the best ones are the totally unexpected, in which a movie seems to be humming along on one clear track, and then suddenly, the filmmakers trip a switch. Suffice it to say, he comes to regret that last descriptor. The story concludes with him finally unlocking that mystery - and another one he wasn’t expecting, concerning the backstory of Mi-do (Kang Hye-jung), the kind young woman who took him in, helped him in his search, and became his lover. But the Hays Code prevented those movies from ever uncovering an answer as ruthlessly shocking as the one screenwriter Robert Towne cooked up.Īnd that particular, very queasy topic brings us to Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, which seems, for much of its running time, a stylishly executed revenge thriller in which Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) attempts to discover who kidnapped and imprisoned him for several years, and why. “I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you the truth,” Faye Dunaway insists breathlessly, and that’s all par for the course in Roman Polanski’s homage to the classic private-eye pictures of the ‘40s and beyond - in which the beautiful dame paying the bills never owns up to her true intentions, and half the mystery for the gumshoe at the center is cracking the client’s bullshit story. Is people!” Frankly, it’s hard to know what’s made the movie such an enduring favorite - the genius of the twist, or the strangulated intensity of Heston’s line reading. Or, as Heston’s Detective Thorn famously puts it, “Soylent green…. Invented by Serling for his screenplay (the book’s ending was, in fact, much closer to the dreadful conclusion of Tim Burton’s ill-advised remake), the revelation - that the distant planet “where apes evolved from man” was, in fact, Earth itself far in the future - was a masterstroke, and one conveyed via the simple, stark, and iconic image of the Statue of Liberty, half-buried in the sand.Īpes star Charlton Heston was a bit of a twist-ending magnet five years after weeping in the sand, he headlined Richard Fleisher’s classic story of a post-greenhouse world and the food supply that nourishes it. That notoriously miscalculated explainer at the end dulls the impact a bit, but this is nonetheless a terrific twist, capping off a spectacular (and spectacularly influential) horror flick.Īpes co-screenwriter Rod Serling loved a good twist ending - this was the creator and key writer of The Twilight Zone, after all - so the game-changer at the end of the original 1968 adaptation of Pierre Bouelle’s novel was sort of a given. merely seem like Hitch doing his thing. But because Hitchcock’s style, even in this stripped-down, low-budget, black-and-white form, was so lurid and Gothic and over the top, the logistics of putting across “Mother’s” secret - the way she’s photographed, her exaggerated voice, etc. Because the film makes such a leap to that ending, it could easily have been handled clumsily or even comically (this was 1960, after all). The mother of all twist endings (see what I did there?), Psycho is also a classic case, stylistically, of the dog wagging the tail rather than the other way around. (And also, many spoilers to follow, duh.) ![]() Unlike the last-minute sucker punches of the films that follow, it arrives far too damn early, causing viewers - or this viewer, at least - to spend much of the film’s third act puzzling out the twist and finding its many holes, rather than paying attention to what’s happening on screen. (And before you go clicking through and raging in the comments, Chuck-heads, no, your beloved Fight Club isn’t on here, because Fight Club does not have a good twist ending. But it was neither the first nor the last movie to do that ending, or do it well. It ended up not only nabbing two Oscars (for McQuarrie and Spacey), but also redefining the “twist” ending, becoming a kind of shorthand for a left-field, eleventh-hour plot development that reconfigures everything that’s come before. What seemed initially to be a low-budget indie neo-noir/Tarantino riff became the summer’s must-see movie, launching the careers of director Singer, screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie, and co-stars Kevin Spacey and Benicio del Toro, among others. Twenty years ago this week, Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects opened in theaters, and everybody lost their minds.
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