The Tourist (2010)

The studio behind The Tourist bagged one of the most lucrative A-lister pairings in recent memory with Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie in an exotic romantic thriller. But The Tourist falls apart when it arrives at a twist ending that’s both predictable and nonsensical. Jolie plays a femme fatale on the run from the feds who want to catch her tax-evading lover Frank, while Depp plays the unsuspecting traveler who she decides to pin with Frank’s crimes. The two characters end up falling in love during the journey, to the point that Jolie no longer wants to make Depp the scapegoat for Frank.

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But then, it turns out that Depp actually is Frank. This twist doesn’t make any sense and it’s also the most obvious way for the script to resolve the mystery of Frank’s identity. Twists that reveal the villain has been right under the audience’s nose the entire time – like Keyser Söze in The Usual Suspects – only work if the first two acts drop in hints and clues. The Tourist just takes a random left turn.

Spiral: From The Book Of Saw (2021)

Chris Rock set out to reinvent the Saw franchise with his police procedural spin-off Spiral: From the Book of Saw. The movie revolves around the search for a Jigsaw copycat killer, borrowing as much from David Fincher’s grisly neo-noir Se7en as the previous Saw films. With franchise staple John Kramer out of the picture, the big mystery running through this movie is the identity of the new Jigsaw. Rock plays Detective Zeke Banks, a hotshot cop on the trail of the new Jigsaw, and Max Minghella plays his new partner on the case, Detective William Schenk.

Schenk is creepy and suspicious from the first moment he appears on-screen, and Minghella makes no attempt to trick the audience into trusting the character, so no one is surprised when he’s revealed to be the copycat.

Identity (2003)

Ever since Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho arrived as one of the most iconic and influential thrillers ever made, countless imitators have used dissociative identity disorder as a plot device. The same misrepresented mental illness can be seen in Split, Black Swan, Fight Club, Primal Fear, and Dressed to Kill, and it was even seen before Psycho in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Identity sets itself up as an Agatha Christie homage, playing on And Then There Were None with a group of strangers convening at a motel where they get picked off one by one. But it quickly becomes apparent that the movie is borrowing more from Hitchcock than Christie.

With its title alone, James Mangold’s psychological thriller gives away its DID twist. In the first half of Identity, the impending twist reveal about the villain’s multiple personalities is painfully obvious. The reveal is so predictable that in the second half, when he tries to kill the murderous personality, the film loses the plot.

The Visit (2015)

M. Night Shyamalan’s found-footage horror comedy The Visit marked a return to form for the director. He received his best reviews in years for the creepy low-budget tale of two siblings traveling alone to visit their mom’s estranged parents. From the offset, something seems off about Nana and Pop Pop as they run amok around the house at night, attack random people in the street, and wander the grounds armed with a shotgun. They never seem like quirky grandparents; it’s clear that they’re psychotic killers.

It’s a fun modern take on the Red Riding Hood legend with escaped psychiatric patients replacing the grandparents instead of a bloodthirsty Big Bad Wolf. But viewers can see that twist coming from the moment the fake Nana and Pop Pop pick them up at the train station. There isn’t a second that the audience actually believes that these deranged, violent people are really the kids’ grandparents.

Don’t Worry Darling (2022)

Olivia Wilde’s sophomore slump, Don’t Worry Darling, starts off with a similar premise to The Stepford Wives. Florence Pugh plays Alice, a frustrated housewife who feels trapped in the domestic bliss of 1950s Americana and begins to suspect her reality is a lie. But it culminates in a much more baffling and heavy-handed twist than The Stepford Wives. The robot twist in The Stepford Wives pays off the Disney Imagineer plant from earlier in the story and ties in perfectly with the theme of men controlling women in a patriarchal society. Don’t Worry Darling doesn’t stick the landing in quite the same way.

The ‘50s-era town that Alice inhabits turns out to be a modern-day VR simulation that her discontented husband trapped her in. This is exactly the kind of “it was all a dream” cop-out ending that audiences expect from these stories. It never makes for a satisfying conclusion, because it makes the whole dramatic endeavor seem pointless if none of it was real.

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