OK, what the heck. I had been worried when Daniel Craig mentioned that they were trying to inject more humor into the James Bond franchise a few months back, but shrugged it off as silliness. After all, Casino Royale was an amazing movie, and a financially successful one to boot. It was a grittier, more realistic Bond that seemed to connect with audiences in a way that some of the previous efforts had failed to do. Why mess with a good formula? Why?

But the new James Bond movie trailer is here (that’s Quantum of Solace to the lay person… wait, or is it the other way around?), and my fears are confirmed. Quantum of Solace is a comedy, or at least the closest thing to a comedy since the original Peter Sellars Casino Royal back in the 1960’s, or at very least Roger Moore’s Moonraker. I mean, what the hell is going on here. How, after just one film, could they change the formula so much? Marc Foster, who has directed such films as Finding Neverland and Stranger than Fiction surely doesn’t have a clue as to how to direct a Bond flick, especially a 21st century Bond. I mean, did anyone see The Kite Runner? It wasn’t exactly movie good.

I’m terrified by the below James Bond movie trailer, at the amount of jokes Daniel Craig cracks. The scene where he runs into a door and falls backwards is just blasphemy. Walking in on Judi Dench naked? What the hell? And the Bond girl… is actually a man.

Of course, I’m joking. The new Quantum of Solace movie trailer looks awesome. It has the same serious tone, has some great action sequences and all around maintains the look and feel of Casino Royale. I am so excited for this one.

People love twist endings. Anyone who says otherwise is full of crap. But there are good twist endings and there are bad twist endings, and sometimes it’s a fine line between the two. Having looked at other “Best Twist Ending” lists and pulling from my own memory, I have compiled this list of the best twist endings in movie history - and the worst. Of course, there are some movies I haven’t seen and others I just plain forgot about, but these are the ones you have to see - or avoid.

NOTE: Major spoiler alerts.

The Best Twist Endings

1. The Sixth Sense
   These top several twists are hard to rank in any clean order, but I still remember the day I sat in theaters watching M. Night Shyalaman’s masterpiece. The movie was pretty decent but didn’t have much of a plot, and I was wondering where the movie was going to go. And then - bam! Bruce Willis has been dead the whole time. Not only is it an amazingly good twist ending, but it also saves the movie from being just a decent ghost story - and, on a second viewing, Shyalaman throws the truth in your face repeatedly.
2. Primal Fear
   Ed Norton jumped into his career in a big way with this courtroom thriller, where Richard Gere comes to the defense of a seemingly innocent and kind altar boy accused of brutally murdering a priest. Not only is the movie extremely good and offers a first glimpse at the exceptional acting talent stored within Norton, but as it turns out, Norton’s character was faking split personality the entire time.
3. The Usual Suspects
   Considered the best twist ending by many people, it was hard to put this so far down at #3. I’ve seen a couple people put this crime thriller starring Kevin Spacey on “Worst Twist Endings” lists, but those people are just idiots wanting to sound smarter and more sophisticated than everyone else.
4. Oldboy
   Probably the best f-ed up twist ending on the list, this film starts out with a guy waking up in a suitcase on a rooftop after years of mysterious captivity. As he seeks out the truth, he teams up and falls in love with a younger woman. He has sex with her. Then, as we learn, he’s been hypnotized to fall in love with his own daughter - and thus he has unwillingly had sex with her. A second twist comes when the guy decides to erase his memories so he can continue to love and have sex with his daughter.
5. Seven
   This exciting and intriguing thriller has a great cast and a creepy villain, who remains elusive through most of the movie until he conveniently decides to show up for one of the most disturbing twist endings ever. Spacey, the killer, leads the detectives (Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman) out into the middle of nowhere to find the final victim, only to reveal that he is the one who will be killed by Pitt. Why? Because Spacey killed Pitt’s wife, played by Gwenyth Paltrow, to drive him over the deep end. Nice!
6. Angel Heart
   OK, Oldboy is pretty screwed up, but this one isn’t exactly innocent, either. In this movie, a much younger Mickey Rourke starts investigating murders in New Orleans, only to discover that he himself is the Devil incarnate and has killed everyone while possessed. Wow.
7. The Prestige
   The inspiration for writing this post, the Christopher Nolan drama about magicians has several small twist endings that aren’t fully appreciated until repeated viewings. For one, Christian Bale’s character tricks Hugh Jackman into thinking that he got a hold of his journal full of secrets - until Jackman reads that it was all planned. Jackman pulls a similar trick on Bale, revealing to his adversary that he intended to frame him. Then, it is revealed that Jackman’s character is still alive, a result of cloning himself and murdering himself every night. If that’s not f-ed up enough, Bale actually has a twin brother and the two having been living a single life, sharing both a wife and a mistress.
8. The Others
   An elegantly simple and creepy ghost story turns out to be a lot more when it is revealed that Nicole Kidman and her two children, who are allergic to sunlight, have in fact been dead the entire movie, and the ghosts they’ve been seeing are living people attempting to drive them out of the house.
9. Unbreakable
   This is a love-it-or-hate-it film, but M. Night Shyalaman’s follow-up to The Sixth Sense, which also stars Bruce Willis, is one of my favorite movies. There’s not a lot of plot to the film, but once again Shyalaman throws a zinger at us by revealing that Samuel L. Jackson, who has befriended Willis and helped him realize his potential, is in fact a psychopathic killer who has been committing mass murder just to find someone who is “unbreakable.”
10. Arlington Road
    This fast-paced suburban thriller has Jeffrey Bridges suspecting that his neighbor (Tim Robbins) is a domestic terrorist. As it turns out, he’s right, but he unfortunately drives the bomb into the federal building himself, and is ultimately blamed for the deaths of hundreds of people.
11. The Devil’s Advocate
    The title isn’t as metaphorical as one would suspect: Al Pacino really is the Devil, and he wants Keanu Reeves to be the father of his son. When Reeves refuses, the Devil just starts trying all over again.
12. The Game
    This movie is full of coincidences and conveniences, but there are so many little twists in the film that it’s hard not to be entertained. Is everything a game, or is it reality? Sure, it’s pretty unbelievable that Michael Douglas would choose to commit suicide through the exact window (and avoid all of the rafters) where a big balloon is waiting to catch him for his birthday party, but you didn’t see it coming, did you?
13. Scream
    A lot of slasher films have “twists” in regards to who the villains are, but few have pulled it off as well as Wes Craven’s classic. I remember sitting in the theater (sadly, with my mom) when Skeet Ulrich - who had been sliced up quite heavily a few minutes before, hence proving his innocence - licks his fingers and declares that his blood is in fact corn syrup. And there’s not one killer, but two.
14. Psycho (1960)
    I knew the ending before I ever saw the film, so the impact of the big twist was rather lessened, but you still have to respect the fact that Norman Bates dresses up like his mother to kill unsuspecting innocents. That’s just disturbing.
15. Planet of the Apes (1968)
    Another movie where I had seen shots of the ending before I actually saw the movie, the realization that Charlton Heston was never going to make it back home because… he’s already on Earth!
16. American Psycho
    I still don’t fully understand the ending, but I believe Christian Bale’s psychopathic tendencies are all, actually, in his mind.
17. Donnie Darko
    With more of a strange ending than a twist one, it turns out that Donnie’s sleepwalking - which saved him from being crushed by a jet engine at the beginning of the film - has put his mother and sister in peril, as a month later, they are on the plane that will eventually crash into their home a month earlier. Donnie decides to sacrifice himself and die so that his family wouldn’t a month later. Or something like that.
18. Stephen’s King The Mist
    I just watched this movie the other night, and wow, what an ending. This movie shouldn’t have been that good, with mediocre special effects and overblown acting (not to mention it’s a film about random monsters from another dimension), but it is. And the capper: an utterly depressing ending. Thomas Jane’s truck runs out of gas, leaving the five survivors, including his son, stranded in the middle of the mist, which has apparently taken over the entire world. With no chance of survivor, he turns to his gun, which only has four bullets left. He kills the other four people, including his own son, and then steps outside. A minute later, the army shows up and the mist begins to clear. Had he waited a minute longer, he wouldn’t have had to murder his only child! Ouch!
19. Soylent Green
    They’re people! They’re people! The movie is a bit dated now, but if I hadn’t known the ending ahead of time, this would have been a pretty damn good twist ending.
20. Chinatown
    Pretty common nowadays (just watch an episode of Law and Order: SVU), this Jack Nicholson film featured a twist that revealed that 1) Faye Dunaway was not who she first appeared to be and 2) that she was having an incestuous relationship with her own father.
21. Night of the Living Dead
    It’s a bit of a stretch to call this a twist ending, but it’s still a shocking one. Zombies are everywhere, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Militias have moved in to clean out the walking dead, and it looks like our hero (an African American) is safe. But, then, one shooter takes him to be one of the bad guys and shoots him in the head. Not a cheerful ending, but a memorable one.
22. The Ring
    The Naomi Watts horror-thriller that took cinema by storm has a couple twist endings, even if you don’t recognize them as such. In most horror movies, once the protagonist discovers the dead body of the mean ghost, the spirit is usually set free and the movie ends. In The Ring, after Watts saves herself and her son by pulling Tamara’s body from the well, she things all are good. Wrong! Tamara is evil, and she’s just released her spirit to kill at will. And, to ultimately save themselves, Watts decides that she and her son will pass the video onto someone else (I believe a relative).
23. Memento
    Guy Pearce, suffering from severe short term memory, goes through life searching for his wife’s killer and not trusting people. Since the film works in backwards order, we slowly discover that his wife killed herself by tricking Pearce into giving her multiple insulin shots; furthermore, Pearce tricks himself by writing notes about people that aren’t true, so that in the future he won’t listen to their “lies,” which are actually truths.
24. The Descent
    If you’ve seen the original, European version, you’ll know what I mean; if you’ve only seen the American version, where the main character escapes from the monster-filled caves, you won’t. While we get to see the woman escape from the cave, drive away and so on and so forth, that escape is actually in her head - she’s still miles underground, surrounded by the creatures that are going to kill her.
25. Minority Report
    Not really a twist ending, but another one that makes you think. After Tom Cruise is accused of murder, he sets out to clear his name. Since the whole criminal system is based on a predictive, psychic machine that is never wrong, his only way to do that is to prove that the system, which he has believed in for years, is wrong. How does he do it? He sets out to kill the creator of the program, thus triggering the system to alert the authorities. But, since he knows the truth about the creator, the creator wants to kill him, too. If Cruise succeeds, the system fails. If the creator succeeds, the system fails. Bam!
26. Mulholland Drive
    No one really knows what David Lynch’s movie is about, but that doesn’t stop me from being intrigued by the completely weird ending to Mulholland Dr., the movie that put Naomi Watts on the map. There’s something about Pandora’s box, about two leading women being the same person, Watts masturbating and making out with herself, etc.
27. 12 Monkeys
    I didn’t love this Bruce Willis/Brad Pitt movie, but it does have a disturbing ending. After Bruce Willis is sent back in time to stop a virus from wiping out most of mankind, you expect him to find the solution and save humanity. Instead, he fails, and his child-self gets to watch him get killed by security guards in an airport. Cheerful.

So-So or Overrated Twist Endings

The following list contains several movies with endings that I have liked, but haven’t loved. #1 on the list should evoke some emotion, but I stand by it. The twist endings in this list neither made the movies better or worse.

1. Fight Club
   This is the one movie that will cause people to complain about this list. Many would rank this ending as one of the best endings in cinema history, as it is revealed that Ed Norton and Brad Pitt are, in fact, the same person. While I’m sure it worked in the book, I think this is a bit of a cop-out. Fight Club is still a pretty good and imaginative movie, but the fact that everything we saw was a lie - and that it really never makes complete sense - doesn’t have me drooling over the ending like it causes some people to do.
2. Swimming Pool
   This great thriller starring Charlotte Rampling has an aging author staying at a French villa only to discover that a sexy younger woman has shown up to share space. Intrigued by her sexuality, a subtle erotic thriller and ultimately murder mystery ensue… but then we discover that everything is all in her head and that we simply saw her imagination at work as she developed her story. Normally I don’t like endings where it turns out everything is a dream, but Swimming Pool pulled it off. Still, some would see it as a cop-out.
3. Signs
   I have mixed emotions about the twist ending here. When I first saw Signs, I liked it a lot. It was creepy, suspenseful, and had an ending that at least wrapped things up. Still, it seems like M. Night Shylaman threw a twist ending into the film for the sake of not letting his fans down, and a lot of people didn’t buy into the “Swing away” line. I don’t hate the ending, but it’s rather unnecessary.
4. No Way Out
   In this spy thriller, it turns out that Kevin Costner, who has been searching for a Russian mole, is, in fact, the Russian mole. It’s sort of a silly ending that seems thrown in there at the last moment, but I certainly didn’t see it coming.
5. Citizen Kane
   Does this movie have a twist ending? No, not really. In my relentless attempt to prove that people only like Citizen Kane as much as they say is because other people say it’s a classic, I have to point out that it’s pretty damn stupid that the love of the main character’s life turns out to be a sled. Really?
6. Eastern Promises
   In this decent thriller from David Cronenber, it is revealed that the ruthless Russian mobster played by Viggo Mortensen, who took it upon himself to protect Naomi Watts from his own people, is actually an undercover detective. The surprise really doesn’t make the movie any better, and in many ways it takes the emotional impact of the movie out of the story. After all, Mortensen never really had to make a choice between his people and Watts; he was against them from the start.
7. The Village
   Another M. Night Shyalaman film, The Village is a pretty decent drama. I wasn’t crazy about the film because it was marketed as a horror movie, even though it isn’t, and maybe that distracted me from a pretty good twist ending. It’s not the direction I wanted the film to take, but the ramifications are huge: as it turns out, there are no monsters in the woods. The monsters were devised by the elders of the village to keep the younger people from venturing away, which would lead them to the wall: on the other side, a paved road and modern civilization.
8. Identity
   John Cusack and others find themselves being picked off one by one by an unknown killer. What starts out as a reasonable thriller develops into a supernatural one, and from that somethinge entirely different: all of the characters, including Cusack, are all in the mind of a psychotic killer who is sitting in prison. No one saw this ending coming, though I can’t say it’s an amazing one: once the ending is revealed, the thriller loses any suspense it had going for it.

The Worst Twist Endings

Below is a list of the worst twist endings known to man:

1. The Forgotten
   What could have been a really good movie turns out to be a film about aliens experimenting on people. Aliens? Come on. This movie has the worst twist ending ever, and due to some scenes shown in the previews, you actually could see it coming.
2. The Number 23
   This thriller was supposed to put Jim Carrey on the map as a truly serious actor, but it failed miserably. Not only was his acting terrible, but the movie features one of the most disappointing endings ever. Having been seduced and driven to obsessed madness by a book that seems to parallel his life, giving us hints at Satan and other disturbing ramifications, it is revealed that Carrey himself wrote the book while he was in a psychiatric hospital that he no longer remembers. So the twist is: he actually is crazy and he wrote the book himself. Wow. Stupid.
3. Secret Window
   This Johnny Depp film had potential, but it has a strangely predictable ending, and one that was not particularly good. After it is revealed that he himself is off his rocker and has killed every victim, Depp never gets punished but does decide to get braces. Huh?
4. Hide and Seek
   Hide and Seek features another predictable ending. In fact, it is so bad that when I realized it in the first 30 minutes of the movie, I prayed for the next hour that I was wrong. As it turns out, Dakota Fanning doesn’t have an imaginary friend who kills people, but instead it’s her father - the main character, played by Robert DeNiro - who has a split personality. The split personality twist ending is almost always a deal killer, and Hide and Seek proves it.
5. Saw
   I only put this on the list because I’ve seen Saw mentioned on other Best Twist Ending lists. It’s not much of a twist ending, but after the protagonists do themselves in, it is revealed that the corpse in the middle of the room is in fact the killer - and that he’s just been lying still for the last two hours. It just doesn’t make much sense, nor is it very exciting.
6. Perfect Stranger
   This Halle Berry thriller is about as bad as it looks. I lost interest halfway through and thus was only paying attention at half staff when the twist ending is revealed, but the fact that the main character - Berry - is in fact the unknown killer she’s been hunting is just downright stupid.
7. Never Talk to Strangers
   Like Hide and Seek and Perfect Stranger, here’s another movie that ends with the revelation and the main protagonist is actually the bad guy.
8. The Life of David Gale
   Kevin Spacey is on death row for a crime he didn’t commit… or did he? As it turns out, he faked murder to get convicted and sentenced to death, so he could prove that the death sentence is inhumane. Uh… OK.
9. Planet of the Apes (2001)
   In this pointless remake directed by Tim Burton, Mark Wahlberg finally escapes from Ape World to land back on Earth… only to find that the Lincoln Memorial has the face of an ape. Unlike in the original, where there’s a lot less tacky and much more iconic view of the Statue of Liberty - implying that Heston is on Earth and is simply far in the future - this ending implies that there’s an alternate dimension or something like that. It’s just cheesy, and a stupid way to lead the audience into the ending credits.
10. No Country for Old Men
    The Oscar-winning drama-thriller really doesn’t have a twist ending, unless you allow the fact that the Coen brothers kill the protagonist off screen, never explain how he died and that the movie has switched gears to a pointless and rambling speech by Tommy Lee Jones. It’s one of the most disappointing endings to an otherwise excellent film.
11. Fallen
    In this supernatural thriller, Denzel Washington hunts a killer that moves from body to body, possessing people to carry out its evil will. Denzel figures out a way to trap and kill the demon - by luring it into the woods away from bodies to transfer to - only to end up being possessed himself. So, at the end of the movie, evil wins and Denzel is possessed by a demon. Almost good, but not.
12. High Tension
    An ending that is so good it’s bad, High Tension, which could have been one of the most memorable and disturbing slasher films in recent memory, ends with a whimper when it is revealed that the sexually charged killer, played by a man, is actually the female protagonist, who, driven by jealousy, has gone insane. The twist, while shocking, really never makes sense, especially considering the fact that in the first scene the killer is shown jerking himself off with a decapitated head.

I hate the Saw movies. Despite what some people think, the first one was bad and they just got worse from there. Bad acting and directing gave way to one attempt after the next to shock the audience more and more, while becoming more convoluted and cocky with each outing. The fourth Saw movie was especially bad, the worst of the franchise.

Still, even though the main villain has been dead for over a full movie now, Lionsgate is milking its franchise once again with Saw V. I don’t blame them - audiences continue to swarm to this franchise for some God-awful reason. How much abuse can audiences take? Lionsgate is putting that question to the test.

Regardless, Lionsgate recently released a new Saw V movie poster, and I have to admit that it’s pretty damn good. Disturbing and creepy, it features Tobin Bell’s face plastered over someone else. Clever, and damn good marketing. Here’s the movie poster:

Before Wanted graced the screen last night, the movie trailer for Death Race - which has been online for a couple weeks now - reared its ugly head, and wow, does it look just as bad as the original Sylvestor Stallone movie.

I never liked the original cult classic, of what little I can remember of it, but I did have some strange hope that this new 2008 version, which stars Jason Statham, would be some visceral form of entertainment. Boy, was I wrong. This new Death Race, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, who, with Alien vs. Predator under his belt, can rival Uwe Boll at times,  looks about as bad as movies get. Dreary and plotless, a remake of Stone Cold’s The Condemned only with more recognizable actors, Death Race just looks stupid. And dull. The action doesn’t look interesting in the least, and the presence of Joan Allen is just more shocking than anything else. Statham, who has made a career out of starring in bad action movies, I can understand, but Allen? Really?

The only saving grace, though, is Statham, who does seem to make even the worst action movies somewhat entertaining. Crank was pushing it, and Death Race looks to push that theory even further.

If you haven’t watched the Death Race movie trailer, click here.

The Friday box office estimates are in for the June 27-29 weekend, giving us a hint of what the final box office numbers will be. Many box office analysts expected both the family-friendly Wall-E and the R-rated action movie Wanted to do well, but the box office weekend is shaping up to a be a bigger one than first expected.

Wall-E, which was expected to be the big winner of the weekend, took in $23.3 million on Friday alone, shaping up for approximately $67 million over the three-day span. That’s just shy of Pixar’s record with The Incredibles, which took in a little over $70 million a few years ago. It’s also a lot higher than what the excellent Ratatouille opened to last year.

Wanted, which stars Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy, took in a whopping $18.7 million on Friday, which should lead to a much higher than expected $53 million weekend. Wanted will be the biggest June R-rated opening ever, knocking off Knocked Up’s $30.6 million.

The movie trailer for Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla is online, and the crime thriller looks a lot more like his earlier films (Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) than his later, less desirable flicks (Swept Away and Revolver). Watch the RocknRolla movie trailer now:

Check out the new Eagle Eye movie trailer, as seen below. This movie looks pretty cool, though could be one of those films that ends up being preposterously bad if there are too many plot holes. The movie stars Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan, Rosario Dawson, Michael Chiklis, Anthony Mackie and Billy Bob Thornton, though doesn’t the voice sound like Julianne Moore?

Wow. I finally watched The Happening last night, after over a week of listening to bad reviews and a warning from my brother that M. Night Shyamalan had inflicted upon audiences something worse than death. But the movie looked cool, and I was willing to look past the quasi-disappointing The Village and the downright bad Lady in the Water in hopes that The Happening would be more along the lines of his first three major films, which I liked.

I didn’t think The Happening could be that bad. At the very least, my expectations were so hampered by other people’s opinions that I figured I’d like it on those merits alone - after all, if you’re expecting something bad, you can often come away enjoying the picture (like Fantastic Four 2).

The Happening was worse than I could have ever imagined. In fact, it will most likely go down as the worst movie of 2008 and a likely candidate for the ultimate Razzie. It’s amazing, but it’s true. Read my full, profanity-laden The Happening movie review here.

Get Smart and The Love Guru open this weekend in a rare big comedy vs. big comedy battle. Of course, it’s not going to be much of a battle.

In one corner, we have Steve Carell’s Get Smart, which has looked funny from the first preview of Carell stuck in a phone booth. In the other corner, the absolutely God-awful looking The Love Guru, which stars Mike Myers retreading what he’s already done before - only much, much worse (read the Love Guru movie review).

Despite last year’s disaster Evan Almighty, Carell is in the prime of his career. With The Office and The 40-Year Old Virgin still fresh on people’s minds, not to mention the great Get Smart previews, I expect big things for this movie. As for The Love Guru… I am expecting Little Nicky type numbers, only maybe not that bad.

Neither film has received very good reviews, but Get Smart should handily win the weekend. I’m not a box office expert, and in fact I rarely make box office predictions, but I’ve been seeing box office predictions for Get Smart between the $40 and $50 million mark. For The Love Guru, anywhere from $20 to $35 million.

Now, I’m not generally one to oppose weekend box office estimates, but I’m a little surprised by these numbers. I believe Get Smart is going to make close to $60 million, and The Love Guru less than $20. Yes, I think Get Smart is going to do that well at the box office, and The Love Guru that pitiful. I will be disappointed if The Love Guru makes more than that.

I, like many people, have been skeptical about the upcoming Star Wars: The Clone Wars movie. After all, it’s an animated film, and Star Wars isn’t meant to be animated, at least not on the big screen.

Thankfully, the new movie trailer actually makes the movie look pretty decent. The trailer is treated no different than the previews for any of the other Star Wars film, with brooding music that leads to the standard Star Wars music. There’s very little dialogue - playing it safe, I see - and lots of long distance shots, which is where the visual effects look the best. All in all, this is a very good movie trailer, especially given the footage.

Unfortunately, I still think releasing this film to the big screen is a mistake. Yes, it’s going to make much more money than it would have on TV, but there’s just something about releasing an animated Star Wars to theaters that seems damaging to the series as a whole (yes, even given the fact that the prequels weren’t exactly fabulous). Star Wars: The Animated Series is a great idea, and as long as it stays on TV it can remain fairly independent from the movies. However, with its theatrical release upcoming, it’s going to be very hard to separate it out. And considering that the characters look pretty silly, that’s not good.