- 9 hours ago
Just when you think you know who’s in charge, these movies flip the script. Here are 10 films that shockingly switch protagonists halfway through.
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00Some writers and directors can't seem to just settle on one main character, so why not have them all?
00:05Keep your head on the swivel because here come 10 films that swapped out their protagonist once the film was already well underway,
00:12changing the plot dramatically and dropping the floor from right underneath our butts.
00:16With major spoilers ahead, I'm Ewan, this is War Culture, and here are movies that shockingly switch protagonist halfway.
00:24Bad Times at the El Royale
00:26The man behind Netflix's brilliant 2015 Daredevil TV series, Drew Goddard, returned to the big screen in 2018 with a mystery movie for the ages, Bad Times at the El Royale.
00:37The film sees an all-star cast of seven strangers converge in a seedy motel that rests on state lines for a night of mystery, murder, and life-changing revelations.
00:46Although Bad Times features an ensemble cast, we enter it very much through special agent Dwight Broadbeck's perspective,
00:52a character portrayed by Jon Hamm, who attends the motel under the guise of a travelling salesman to uncover some state-level secrets.
01:00That is, until he is slain with a shotgun halfway through the film.
01:04Lost amid a sea of hustlers and two-faced good-for-nothings, our perspective gradually settles behind the unlikely duo of Robert and Priest's clothing,
01:12Doc O'Kelly, Jeff Bridges, and struggling singer Darlene Sweet, played by Cynthia Erivo.
01:18And we're lucky it does, because the unlikely pair are the only ones to make it out of the film alive.
01:23The Place Beyond the Pines
01:25It can be a serious shocker when a film marketed as a run-of-the-mill Oscar-bait drama takes some bold and ambitious narrative turns,
01:32but that is precisely what happened with Place Beyond the Pines.
01:35Kearney motorbike stunt rider Luke, played by Ryan Gosling, botches a robbery and is shot dead around the midpoint of the film,
01:41at which point the narrative is taken up by Avery, a character played by Bradley Cooper, the police officer who did the shooting.
01:48Packing in not one, but two major star leads, Place Beyond the Pines wrangles a challenging narrative that transitions from crime thriller into something more akin to a kitchen sink drama.
01:58Avery tries to make amends with Luke's widow and ultimately faces a reckoning some 15 years later when he comes face-to-face with Luke's son.
02:061917
02:07Inspired by stories told to direct Sam Mendes by his grandfather, 1917 follows soldier Tom Blake, played by Dean Charles Chapman,
02:15on his mission to carry a message calling off an attack the next morning that threatens the lives of 1,600 serving British soldiers, including his brother Joseph.
02:24Along with the ride is Lance Corporal William Schofield, played by George McKay, a veteran of the Somme and an all-around survivor.
02:31Thanks to some pretty serious, brother-shaped motivation, Tom appears to be the film's lead at the beginning,
02:37utilizing a rich backstory and purpose to drive the plot forward.
02:41But after a close encounter with a rather ungrateful German fighter pilot seized into an early grave,
02:47William takes over to see their duty is done.
02:49Side Effects
02:50Steven Soderbergh loves nothing more than to experiment across genres and forms,
02:55having contributed widely to most corners of the film canon throughout an illustrious career.
03:00Due to form, then, that his thriller side effects ends up being a two-hander.
03:04Emily Taylor, played by Rooney Mara, seemingly murders her husband in her sleep while on prescribed medication to manage her depression.
03:10But when she gets off scot-free, the blame and the narrative perspective shifts to her psychiatrist, Jonathan Banks,
03:18who has been ruined in the process of prescribing her the experimental drugs.
03:22But all is never as it seems.
03:24Transitioning from the tragic story of a woman let down by a flawed system to the struggle of a well-meaning but equally unfortunate psychiatrist,
03:32Side Effects uses the shift in protagonist to reveal the film's dark heart.
03:36Turns out Emily did it on purpose.
03:39Jonathan thus has to spend the remainder of the film clearing his name against our lying and deeply duplicitous original protagonist,
03:46discovering in the process that she has been in league with one of his colleagues all along.
03:50Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
03:51Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, the first film in Park Chan-wook's Vengeance trilogy,
03:56wasn't well-received upon release, less because of its narrative choices than because of its sudden and shocking moments of violence.
04:03The film sees a deaf-mute man Ryu, played by Shin Ha-kyun, engaged in a desperate struggle to help his ailing sister receive the kidney transplant she needs to survive.
04:13After being conned out of his own kidney and left penniless and in pain,
04:17he kidnaps the daughter of a wealthy businessman Park Dong-jin, played by Song Kang-ho,
04:22in a last-ditch attempt to get the money needed for his sister's operation.
04:26Wackiness thus ensues as Ryu tries to make sure the little girl doesn't know she's been kidnapped while sending her father ransom notes and pictures of her crying.
04:35However, in a tragic sequence of pure circumstance, Ryu's sister takes her own life, the little girl drowns, and the perspective shifts,
04:45becoming all about her father's quest for vengeance.
04:47Dong-jin hires investigators, uncovers clues, and tortures his way to Ryu's door.
04:53While Ryu's quest to exact his own revenge on the cartel who stole his kidney quietly continues in the background.
04:59Damsel, 2018
05:01Not to be confused with the Millie Bobby Brown vehicle, David Zellner's Damsel is a western with a black comedy core
05:08that tramples over most of the usual cowboy cliches in order to access a twisted tale of a defiantly liberated woman.
05:15A spin on the classic damsel in distress trope set in the Old West, Penelope, Mia Wasikowska, is kidnapped from her beau, Samuel, played by Robert Pattinson.
05:24Thinking himself the captain of his soul and the hero of this story, Samuel goes on a mission to rescue the woman he loves,
05:30haphazardly killing her captor in the process.
05:33Alas, he discovers that she doesn't actually want to be with him at all, and that Penelope had staged her kidnapping in the hope of getting rid of him.
05:43This draw, Samuel kills himself, and Penelope then becomes the new protagonist,
05:47fending off advances left and right while trying to survive and get maybe just a little of what she actually wants.
05:54Death Proof
05:55After a string of hit movies, Quentin Tarantino used his industry pull to fund a passion project back in the mid-2000s.
06:02Gazing fondly back to the exploitation flicks of his youth, the director brought us Death Proof,
06:07a grindhouse B-movie homage about a serial killer stuntman named Mike, played by Kurt Russell,
06:12with a luxurious bouffant, a dynamite wardrobe, and an indestructible car.
06:17Stuntman Mike is not, however, the main character.
06:20The four young women he stalks take that honour, and around the midpoint of the movie,
06:25he wipes them off the face of the earth in one grisly quote-unquote accident.
06:30Yep, Death Proof sees all the main cast except for the antagonist ceremoniously bite the dust,
06:35to be replaced in the subsequent second half by a hardier foursome,
06:38played by Rosario Dawson, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Tracy Toms, and real-life stuntwoman Zoe Bell,
06:44who proved to be Mike's undoing.
06:46Dressed to Kill
06:47Man, you gotta love Brian De Palma.
06:49The 70s and 80s saw him turn out mega-hits like Scarface and The Untouchables,
06:54the latter of which never fails to make me cry.
06:56Long live Agent Wallace, gone but not forgotten, I love you.
06:59Anyway, Dressed to Kill, a movie I actually only saw the other week and is clearly one of the most
07:04technically accomplished films of De Palma's career, follows Angie Dickinson's Kate Miller,
07:09who is bored with her home life and ready for some excitement that doesn't involve her husband
07:13rolling off her after a rigid three-minute bit of missionary.
07:16Sadly, following a steamy encounter with a stranger, she is hacked to death in his apartment's elevator
07:22with a straight razor.
07:23The escort who witnesses the murder, Liz Blake, played by De Palma regular Nancy Allen,
07:27becomes the film's focus alongside Keith Gordon's Peter Miller, who you may recognize from Christine,
07:33as they try to find out precisely who'd done it before they get her to.
07:36Psycho, 1960
07:38Alfred Hitchcock's chilling classic Psycho took audiences by storm in the 1960s and is still
07:44recognized today as not just a cornerstone feature of horror cinema, but also as a thoroughly
07:49original excursion into the possibilities of narrative storytelling.
07:53In a brisk opening act, Marion Crane, played by Janet Leigh, steals money from her work and
07:57makes a hasty getaway to her fancy man's place.
08:00On the way, she stops the night at the Bates Motel, and things, well, they take a turn
08:05for the unexpected.
08:06Marion is slain, suddenly and brutally, by Mother in the motel shower, passing the narrative
08:12torch to her sister and the private detective investigating her murder.
08:16The story then focuses on the horrors that surround Norman Bates, played by the legendary
08:21Anthony Perkins, and the film goes from potential crime keeper to bloody disturbing horror, Barbarian.
08:27Play 22's Barbarian starts off as a psychological thriller set in a rented house in Detroit that
08:33two people have bucked, bringing Tess Marshall, Georgina Campbell, into collision with Keith
08:38Toshko, an immediately creepy Bill Skarsgård.
08:41As the evening progresses, the pair unwind, and it seems Keith isn't such a bad guy after
08:45all.
08:46The night goes smoothly, and the pair head out for the day, safe in the knowledge that
08:49they will be returning not to a psychopathic killer, but to maybe a new friend.
08:54This sets up a 1-2-3 punch.
08:57Keith turns out to be neither antagonist nor protagonist, and is killed in the first act.
09:02Tess is kidnapped by a creature living under the house, and we are then flung many states
09:07away from the action, characters, and established plot.
09:10Writer and director Zack Greger piles on the tension by having the film switch on a whim
09:14to the life of sleazy TV actor AJ Gilbride, played by a brilliant Justin Long, who owns and
09:20manages the rental from California.
09:22Fired for being a big ol' creep to his co-stars, he makes the cross-state journey to inspect
09:26the place before he can sell it to cover his legal costs.
09:29The film then pivots to a creature feature flick as AJ uncovers the subterranean maze under
09:35the house, where he finds Tess and has to fight dirty to make it back out with his life intact.
09:40to be seen with the hydroutine, with Tang Washington, to be in good news page, and it turns to police
09:45fiery pops before he can see pain is deep into with the
09:50sparks.
09:53Look at it and wonder what he takes to do before and take care of heading to burrow
09:56to the path forward and start welcoming his全部 pana 하겠습니다!
Recommended
10:17
|
Up next
12:44
16:19
12:46
11:05
10:44
9:59
11:47
10:48
14:22
10:16
13:23
2:59
8:03
3:52
1:37
11:04
11:18
Be the first to comment