Heavens to Shyamalan, there's a lot of bait-and-switching going on in our movie theaters these days. Maybe the revelations of massively fraudulent shenanigans in the financial industry a year back sparked a sudden demand for scripts that pull the wool over our eyes.
"Shutter Island" assigns jittery, hallucination-prone detective Leonardo DiCaprio to poke around Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane. And then there's a big last reel surprise.
"Remember Me" puts Robert Pattinson and Emilie De Raven in a summer love story in a sort of contemporary but not really time specific Manhattan. Then come fall, something unexpected and epic happens that dramatically reframes the whole story. This Friday's bloody sci-fi actioner "Repo Men" stars Jude Law as an enforcer who repossesses artificial organs for a greedy corporation. After much bloodletting it takes a sharp left swerve into Philip K. Dick territory with a mind-warping switcheroo. Nobody likes movies that recycle a tired old formuls, and there's nothing wrong with taking a movie to a surprising, unpredictable conclusion. But these amazing twists are contrived rather than amazing. Not like the sudden appearance of the Statue of Liberty in "Planet of the Apes," or the revelation that "The Maltese Falcon" is a worthless reproduction, or the Keyser Soze con job in "The Usual Suspects." These new twist finales are the credit default swaps of storytelling, cheap gimmicks that look impressive until you realize they're worthless. What sudden reversal made a movie unforgettable for you? The Darth Vader revelation? The Tyler Durden's true identity? Mrs. Bates' close-up in "Psycho"? "Citizen Kane's" bombshell, pictured above? Let's hear about it.
