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Pixar played us like a damn fiddle.
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00:00The nature of movies as entertainment dictates that, more often than not, we as audiences fully expect the hero to
00:07eventually prevail over the villain,
00:09because people love to witness good triumphing over evil, after all.
00:12And while there are certainly movies that willfully buck that trend and hand the win to the antagonist,
00:17more common is a film which tries to fake viewers out, by getting the villain as close to victory as
00:23possible,
00:23before allowing the heroic side to pull things back.
00:26These ten movies, from blood-soaked action flicks to family-friendly animated masterpieces,
00:31all dared to dupe audiences into genuinely believing that the villain was about to come on top,
00:37only to pull the rug out and deliver some major catharsis at the last minute.
00:41In some cases, it was clearly the right call, but in others, it sure would have been refreshing to see
00:46the smart or skillful antagonist actually emerge victorious for all their efforts.
00:51With that in mind, I'm Will for What Culture, and here are ten awesome movie moments where you think the
00:56villain might actually win.
00:58Ten, Billy Bites the Dust, The Departed.
01:01Until its final few moments, Martin Scorsese's remake of the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs
01:06looks like it's going to follow the original's downer ending to the letter.
01:10In the third act, undercover cop Billy is killed while attempting to expose corrupt cop Colin,
01:16seemingly leaving Colin to get away unpunished, as his equivalent does in the original Infernal Affairs.
01:22However, in the interest of a more crowd-pleasing Hollywood ending,
01:25they tack on a final scene where Colin is confronted in his apartment by Sergeant Dingham,
01:30who promptly shoots him in the head as he arrives home.
01:33It really did seem like Colin had his slippery escape all mapped out,
01:37but along came Scorsese with a surprising, happy ending totally out of nowhere.
01:41While undeniably a concession in remaking the bleaker original movie for a more mainstream global market,
01:47it is still an effective ending on its own terms.
01:50Nine, it's going to be biblical.
01:53Law-abiding Citizen.
01:54Law-abiding Citizen is a terrific guilty pleasure movie in which bereaved engineer Clyde Shelton
02:00becomes a vigilante while seeking vengeance for the murder of his wife and daughter.
02:05Shelton strikes back against the corrupt legal system throughout the film,
02:08killing anyone who gets in his way while thoroughly toying with his bureaucratic former attorney, Nick Rice,
02:14in order to demonstrate the hypocrisy of American law.
02:18Shelton's methods are brutal, no question, but he is an extremely easy character to root for,
02:23especially when the only alternative is Jamie Foxx's thoroughly unlikable lawyer.
02:27Yet, dollars to donuts, Shelton is supposed to be the movie's bad guy.
02:31This all culminates in a fantastic end-of-second-act speech where Shelton tells Rice,
02:36quote,
02:37I'm going to bring the whole effing diseased, corrupt temple down on your head.
02:41It's going to be biblical.
02:43It's a delicious, I am death, destroyer of worlds, type speech that perfectly sets the stage for Act 3,
02:50where the audience largely hopes Shelton will indeed burn the entire system to the ground.
02:54Sadly, that's not quite what happens, as his attempt to blow up City Hall ends with Rice sneaking the bomb
03:00into Shelton's own prison cell,
03:02instead blowing him to smithereens, which is, frankly, disappointing.
03:06I kind of wanted him to murder all those people.
03:09Eight, Wash dies, Serenity.
03:12Joss Whedon really just loves to play with his fans like a cat playing with a mouse before devouring them,
03:17and that's never been truer than in his Firefly spin-off movie, Serenity.
03:21After Wash successfully pilots his titular ship through a battle between the Reavers and the Alliance,
03:26he's fatally impaled out of nowhere by a Reaver spear,
03:30breaking fans' hearts while setting an anything-goes tone for the remainder of the third act.
03:35According to Whedon himself, he killed Wash in such jarringly abrupt fashion for precisely this reason,
03:41to make audiences think that any of the remaining characters could actually die during the rest of the film.
03:46While all of Wash's crewmates ultimately do survive,
03:49killing a character as beloved as Wash demoralised fans enough to believe that Mal, Zoe, and company could also meet
03:56their maker.
03:57Seven, the sad ending, Wayne's World.
04:00A slightly more light-hearted entry, as Wayne's World seems to end with Wayne being dumped by his girlfriend
04:05after a major record label rejecter, finding out his ex Stacy is pregnant and watching his house burn down,
04:11while Cassandra ends up with sleazy TV producer Benjamin.
04:15But at that moment, Wayne and Garth break the fourth wall to address the audience,
04:19explaining that they'd never end the movie like this,
04:21instead giving the ending a mega-happy do-over where everyone, even Benjamin, emerges satisfied.
04:27What makes this rug pull so hilarious is that the dark, original ending is probably the more realistic outcome of
04:33the movie's events,
04:33save for the fire, maybe, to the extent where Benjamin actually asked the audience,
04:38you didn't really think she'd end up with Wayne, did you?
04:40It honestly feels like a totally reasonable comment.
04:43Though it would have been a brave and bold dose of realism,
04:46counter to what audiences expect from most coming-of-age comedies,
04:49it really wouldn't have fit the movie's tone at all,
04:51so the alternate happy ending was probably for the best.
04:54Six, Vincent vs. Max. Collateral.
04:57This incredible neo-noir focuses on a timid cab driver, Max,
05:01who is forced to drive charming, grey-haired assassin Vincent around LA,
05:05as he carries out a series of hits.
05:07It's little surprise that the film culminates in a violent showdown
05:10between the twitchy hero and the smooth-as-silk villain,
05:14but given the sheer, unwavering skill of Vincent's gunplay,
05:17and the movie's generally nihilistic tone,
05:19it actually seems like Vincent might come out on top.
05:22At the end of the movie, Vincent chases Max onto a subway train,
05:25after which a blind shootout takes place,
05:27as the train's lights flicker on and off.
05:29Miraculously, despite Vincent's incredible markmanship giving him a massive advantage,
05:34the feckless Max still manages to mortally wound him,
05:37while emerging entirely unscathed himself.
05:40It's the single truly implausible moment in a movie,
05:43otherwise well-regarded for its rigorously grounded brutality,
05:47and though Vincent's corpse taking a ride on the subway
05:49is an amusing fate for the character,
05:51it's hardly the outcome you'd expect for a guy with his unbelievable shooting skills.
05:565. The Death of Qui-Gon, Star Wars The Phantom Menace
06:00Even though it was tactlessly spoiled by the movie's soundtrack listing shortly before release,
06:05the death of Qui-Gon Jinn at the hands of Darth Maul in Star Wars Episode I
06:09was a massive shocker to most fans.
06:11Furthermore, it was demoralizing enough to suggest that The Phantom Menace
06:15was about to serve up an Empire Strikes Back-esque downer ending for the ages.
06:19While we knew that Obi-Wan Kenobi had to survive the events of the trilogy per necessity,
06:24killing Qui-Gon truly made Darth Maul seem like an insurmountable threat.
06:29After all, Qui-Gon was the master, Obi-Wan was just his apprentice.
06:32So, audiences were shocked when Darth Maul ends up killed,
06:35or as we now know, not killed, by Obi-Wan mere moments later,
06:39seemingly throwing Maul in the bin just as fans got to see how truly badass he could be.
06:44Having the villain's wean in Episode I would have been a fun subversion of the expected,
06:48especially as we were already expecting so much of what would happen in the prequels,
06:52seeing as, you know, they are prequels.
06:54Instead, Maul's iconic murderous act was quickly savored into irrelevance
06:58when Obi-Wan punked him out like a no-named idiot.
07:01You had the high ground, Maul, and you still lost.
07:05Idiot!
07:05Four, The Genesis Countdown, Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan.
07:09Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan is an excellent Trek movie
07:13that was largely praised for delivering arguably the franchise's best-ever villain
07:17in genetically-engineered tyrant Khan, who originally appeared in the show.
07:21Khan is seeking revenge on Captain Kirk for exiling him and causing the death of his wife,
07:25and though he ultimately ends up mortally wounded by the end of the movie,
07:29it also results in Khan's finest moment.
07:32In a last-ditch attempt to annihilate Kirk, Khan activates the Genesis device,
07:37which will ultimately destroy the Enterprise and anything in the vicinity.
07:40With the Enterprise's warp drive damaged and therefore unable to flee from the device,
07:44it truly does feel like Kirk's goose is cut.
07:47Even though we, as Trek fans, knew it was unlikely that the entire crew of the Enterprise would be killed,
07:53Khan's sense of vengeance is so strong it's difficult not to get wrapped up in it.
07:57Ultimately, Khan scores something of a Pyrrhic victory,
08:00in that the Enterprise only escapes Genesis after Spock sacrifices himself to the warp drive,
08:05but it's still far from the retribution Khan envisioned against his true foe.
08:11Three, Stansfield shoots Leon.
08:13Leon the Professional.
08:14The cult classic action thriller Leon, or Leon the Professional in the UK,
08:18is one of the most entertaining films of the 90s,
08:20in large part thanks to Gary Oldman's gloriously scenery-devouring performance
08:24of the pill-popping, murderous, psychopathic, corrupt DEA agent, Norman Stansfield.
08:30And while audiences were certainly rooting for badass assassin Leon to prevail,
08:34Stansfield's plentiful resources and ruthlessly violent methods unsurprisingly
08:38allowed him to get the better of Leon at the end of the movie.
08:41As Leon is mere seconds away from freedom after surviving a brutal siege at his apartment,
08:46he's shot in the back by Stansfield.
08:48As Stansfield smugly presides over his expiring body, it really feels like game over,
08:54but ultimately Stansfield does meet his explosive comeuppance,
08:57as seconds later, Leon reveals himself to be rigged up to a string of soon-to-destinate grenades,
09:03promptly blowing both of them to hell.
09:05Even though Stansfield technically did manage to kill Leon,
09:08getting blown up by your quarry probably doesn't count as a win.
09:12Two, Lotso leaves the toys for dead.
09:14Toy Story 3.
09:15There's a good reason why there aren't any other family films included on this list,
09:20because they typically leave no room for audiences to consider that something very,
09:24very bad might actually happen to the heroes.
09:27Nobody wants a cinema full of wailing kids, after all.
09:30But Toy Story 3 was something different.
09:32It was the culmination of 15 years of storytelling,
09:35a film made primarily for those who grew up with the series and were now themselves adults.
09:40It also followed the likes of Wall-E and Up,
09:42two of the studio's most ambitious and daring offerings to date,
09:45so the prospect of Toy Story 3 taking things in a more mature direction didn't seem so far-fetched.
09:51Roughly two-thirds of the way through the threequel,
09:53Woody and the other toys find themselves betrayed by the villainous Lotso,
09:57who leaves them to be killed by a gigantic incinerator.
10:00The sequence is so fraught with genuine peril,
10:03and came at a time in Pixar's tenure where it really felt like they might offer up
10:08the ultimate existential gut punch by having the toys consumed by the furnace.
10:12Thankfully, this ultimately wasn't the case,
10:15with the aliens making the save courtesy of a giant crane claw,
10:18causing every adult watching to breathe a massive, snotty, tear-soaked sigh of relief.
10:23Obviously, they were never going to really die,
10:25but you weren't thinking that in the moment, were you?
10:28In the theater, the drama of this scene really took over,
10:31and it really felt real.
10:33One, Das Sound Machine's final performance, Pitch Perfect 2.
10:37Pitch Perfect 2 is a prime example of a movie that does such a good job with its villains
10:42that they're often easier to root for than the actual heroes.
10:45The acapella team we're supposed to be cheering on spend most of the movie orally sparring
10:49with the infinitely more talented German squad by the name of Das Sound Machine.
10:54Their moves, their vocals, and the overall polish of their performances
10:57smoke our heroes every single time.
11:00So when Das Sound Machine are finally defeated at the Climactic Worlds Tournament,
11:04it's completely deflating and unbelievable.
11:06It truly seemed like DSM were set for the win,
11:09while our heroes would learn something about the sheer joy of competing,
11:13or some kind of moral like that.
11:14But instead, the movie handed them a hilariously unconvincing,
11:17and totally undeserved win.
11:20They honestly could have taken it in an interesting direction, but they didn't.
11:23Am I demanding too much from a Pitch Perfect film?
11:26Almost definitely yes, but come on, it would have been interesting.
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