The Worst:
A.I. (2001)
One of my day jobs is teaching various screenwriting courses, and I always use A.I. as a prime example of how NOT to end a movie. Of course, Steven Spielberg pretty much deserves his own wing in the terrible ending hall of fame: Minority Report, Saving Private Ryan, Munich, Schindler’s List and the tacky, tacked-on “Special Edition” ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which pretty much robbed the original ending of all its original mystery and wonder by not freakin’ knowing when to leave well enough alone. Of course, this unnatural, Brundlefly amalgam of the director’s flashy Hollywood huckster instincts and the Kubrickian darkness of the project’s original father (who died while the project was still mired in development hell) is pretty hapless throughout its running time, but it does manage a nice, poetic moment when David (Haley Joel Osment), a robot programmed to yearn for love from a mother who despises him, winds up trapped beneath the ocean, staring at a statue of the Blue Fairy, wishing endlessly for something he can never have. Hmm, I thought watching the movie for the first time, not a bad little dramatization of the human condition there, Spielberg...for don’t we all wish for things we’re programmed to want but can never achieve? Yet Spielberg, being the kind of guy who DOES get everything he wants, apparently has no use for the bittersweet frustrations of the great unwashed. Nope, Spielberg’s all about happy endings...and, apparently, mommy issues, because the movie doesn’t stop there: instead, it goes on and on and interminably on, getting sillier (and creepier) with each passing moment, as millennia pass and magical future robots allow little David to finally get what he always wanted...alone time in bed with a mother who LOVES him and ONLY him, dammit! C.G.I. + T.M.I. = ick. (AO)
CONTACT (1997)
Seriously, Robert Zemeckis and Carl Sagan? After all the mind-numbing science-vs.-faith arguments between Jody Foster’s astronomer and Matthew McConaughey’s minster, all you deliver is a silly-looking CG beach landscape – snow white sand! glowing blue water! – and the revelation that the much-discussed alien/God is Foster’s dearly departed daddy? It’s a figurative punch in the stomach from a film that’s already spent two hours slapping us in the face with faux-profound jibber-jabber and wannabe-2001 “trippy” sequences. (NS)
SCHOOL DAZE (1988)
So far, so good: by the time he reached the end of his second feature, School Daze, Spike Lee had opened up to new filmmaking techniques as well as expanding his political and emotional canvas to much wider and deeper topics than he’d attempted in She’s Gotta Have It. As the final moments of the two-hour film approached, Lee had introduced elements as far-ranging and controversial as class and race issues in the black community, date rape, divestiture, careerism and gentrification, and revolution vs. assimilation. It would be difficult to tie all those threads together, but Lee had matured so much as a filmmaker, viewers were confident he could pull it off. So what happens? Lawrence Fishburne lumbers all over campus, hollering “WAKE UP!” to audience and actors alike, all of whom seem surprised that he’s gone off script. Viewers wanted to wake up, all right – to a world in which Lee hadn’t pissed away all the goodwill of the rest of the movie on this obnoxious, go-nowhere student film ending. (LP)
JUICE (1992)
Whatever alien virus possessed Spike Lee to give School Daze such a flimsy cop-out of an ending, he apparently passed it on to his cinematographer. Four years later, when the talented but inconsistent Ernest Dickerson made his debut as a feature film director, it was with Juice, his own take on the gangsta epic that was then sweeping Hollywood; for most of its running time, it was a particularly compelling example of the genre, buoyed by solid performances in the lead roles by Omar Epps and Tupac Shakur. Then, in the movie’s climactic moments, bam! Spike Lee Disease strikes again: in a turn of events that is, to put it mildly, highly unlikely, Epps’ character tosses aside his piece and then pursues and disarms Shakur, who obligingly falls off of a building. A random partygoer tells Epps that now, he’s got the “juice”, which explains and/or resolves exactly nothing when it comes to everything that has gone before. All that talent on display, and not a script doctor in sight. (LP)
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971)
It’s not exactly Stanley Kubrick’s fault that the ending of A Clockwork Orange falls short. At the time he did his infamous adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel, the actual end of the book, the 21st chapter, was not available in American versions. (Kubrick lived in England, but he’d first read an American edition of the novel.) So when the script was written, he had no idea that the chapter even existed. It features an older if not wiser Alex growing bored with his utra-violent lifestyle and contemplating going straight, getting a job, and raising his own family – a contemplation which, turning the book’s themes of moral panic on their ears, includes the vital possibility that his children might seem as nightmarish to him as he seems to be to his parents’ generation. Without this insight, Burgess considered the American version of the book to be deeply flawed; and without its subversive self-criticism, the movie Kubrick made of it seems morally and philosophically confused. Still, he’s not entirely blameless; when filming started, he got hold of an English edition with the complete 21st chapter, and decided not to change the script one bit. (LP)
THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8th DIMENSION (1984)
Okay, the ending of this neo-pulp cult classic isn’t great. It’s one of those big cast mashups that were ubiquitous in the 1980s, with the whole cast walking purposefully together while music blared on the soundtrack and the camera jumped around showing the audience what it looked like when people walked from one place to another from different angles. But that isn’t what makes it one of the most disappointing endings of all time. It’s the very last thing we see before the movie fades to black: a title card promising that Buckaroo Banzai and His Hong Kong Cavaliers will be back, in Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League. Twenty-five years later, it’s a promise that has yet to be fulfilled. Today, deals are inked to make multi-picture franchises long before they know whether the first movie will be a hit or a dud; even as we speak, a sequel to the nearly universally panned (and not nearly as popular as it was anticipated to be) Transformers movie is gearing up to hit theaters. So why, every time we watch this widely beloved cult hit, must we be reminded of a sequel that’s never going to come? (LP)
Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten & Twelve
Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Leonard Pierce