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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.
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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
00:10already 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
00:33mystery 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
00:42for 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
00:58state-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
01:10of 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
01:22alive.
01:23The Place Beyond the Pines
01:24It can be a serious shocker when a film marketed as a run-of-the-mill Oscar-bait drama takes
01:29some bold and ambitious narrative turns,
01:32but that is precisely what happened with Place Beyond the Pines.
01:35Carnie motorbike stunt rider Luke, played by Ryan Gosling, botches a robbery and is shot dead around the midpoint of
01:41the film,
01:41at which point the narrative is taken up by Avery, a character played by Bradley Cooper, the police officer who
01:47did the shooting.
01:48Packing in not one, but two major star leads, Place Beyond the Pines wrangles a challenging narrative that transitions from
01:54crime 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
02:04face-to-face with Luke's son.
02:061917
02:07Inspired by stories told to director Sam Mendes by his grandfather, 1917 follows soldier Tom Blake, played by Dean Charles
02:15Chapman,
02:15on his mission to carry a message calling off an attack the next morning that threatens the lives of 1
02:20,600 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
02:30all-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
03:10depression.
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,
03:28to 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
03:45protagonist,
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,
03:58less 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,
04:07engaged 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,
04:31while sending her father ransom notes and pictures of her crying.
04:35However, in a tragic sequence of pure circumstance,
04:39Ryu's sister takes her own life,
04:41the little girl drowns,
04:43and the perspective shifts,
04:45becoming all about her father's quest for vengeance.
04:47Dong-jin hires investigators,
04:49uncovers clues,
04:50and tortures his way to Ryu's door.
04:53While Ryu's quest to exact his own revenge on the cartel who stole his kidney,
04:57quietly continues in the background.
04:59Damsel, 2018
05:01Not to be confused with the Millie Bobby Brown vehicle,
05:04David Zellner's Damsel is a western with a black comedy core
05:07that tramples over most of the usual cowboy cliches
05:11in 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,
05:19Penelope, Mia Wasikowska,
05:20is kidnapped from her beau Samuel,
05:22played by Robert Pattinson.
05:24Thinking himself the captain of his soul and the hero of this story,
05:27Samuel goes on a mission to rescue the woman he loves,
05:30haphazardly killing her captor in the process.
05:34Alas, he discovers that she doesn't actually want to be with him at all,
05:38and that Penelope had staged her kidnapping in the hope of getting rid of him.
05:43Distraught, Samuel kills himself,
05:45and Penelope then becomes the new protagonist,
05:47fending off advances left and right while trying to survive
05:50and get maybe just a little of what she actually wants.
05:54Death Proof
05:55After a string of hit movies,
05:56Quentin 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,
06:05the director brought us Death Proof,
06:07a grindhouse B-movie homage about a serial killer stuntman named Mike,
06:11played by Kurt Russell,
06:12with a luxurious bouffant,
06:14a dynamite wardrobe,
06:16and an indestructible car.
06:17Stuntman Mike is not, however,
06:19the main character.
06:20The four young women he stalks take that honor,
06:23and 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,
06:32except 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,
06:40Mary Elizabeth Winstead,
06:42Tracy Toms,
06:42and 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,
06:57gone but not forgotten,
06:58I love you.
06:59Anyway,
07:00Dressed to Kill,
07:01a movie I actually only saw the other week,
07:03and is clearly one of the most technically accomplished films of De Palma's career,
07:07follows Angie Dickinson's Kate Miller,
07:09who is bored with her home life,
07:10and ready for some excitement,
07:12that doesn't involve her husband rolling off her
07:14after a rigid three-minute bit of missionary.
07:16Sadly, following a steamy encounter with a stranger,
07:20she is hacked to death in his apartment's elevator with a straight razor.
07:23The escort who witnesses the murder,
07:25Liz Blake,
07:26played by De Palma regular Nancy Allen,
07:27becomes the film's focus alongside Keith Gordon's Peter Miller,
07:31who you may recognize from Christine,
07:33as they try to find out precisely who'd done it before they get her to.
07:37Psycho,
07:371960
07:38Alfred Hitchcock's chilling classic Psycho took audiences by storm in the 1960s,
07:44and is still recognized today as not just a cornerstone feature of horror cinema,
07:47but also as a thoroughly original excursion into the possibilities of narrative storytelling.
07:53In a brisk opening act,
07:54Marion Crane,
07:55played by Janet Leigh,
07:56steals money from her work,
07:57and makes a hasty getaway to her fancy man's place.
08:01On the way,
08:01she stops the night at the Bates Motel,
08:03and things,
08:04well,
08:04they take a turn for the unexpected.
08:06Marion is slain,
08:07suddenly and brutally,
08:09by mother in the motel shower,
08:11passing the narrative torch to her sister,
08:14and the private detective investigating her murder.
08:16The story then focuses on the horrors that surround Norman Bates,
08:19played by the legendary Anthony Perkins,
08:22and the film goes from potential crime caper to bloody disturbing horror,
08:26Barbarian.
08:272022's Barbarian starts off as a psychological thriller set in a rented house in Detroit that
08:33two people have booked,
08:34bringing Tess Marshall,
08:36Georgina Campbell,
08:37into collision with Keith Toshko,
08:39an immediately creepy Bill Skarsgård.
08:41As the evening progresses,
08:42the pair unwind,
08:43and it seems Keith isn't such a bad guy after all.
08:46The night goes smoothly,
08:47and the pair head out for the day,
08:48safe in the knowledge that they will be returning,
08:50not to a psychopatic killer,
08:52but to maybe a new friend.
08:54This sets up a 1-2-3 punch.
08:57Keith turns out to be neither antagonist nor protagonist,
09:00and is killed in the first act.
09:02Tess is kidnapped by a creature living under the house,
09:05and we are then flung many states away from the action,
09:08characters,
09:09and established plot.
09:10Writer and director Zach Kregor piles on the tension,
09:12by having the film switch on a whim,
09:14the life of sleazy TV actor,
09:16AJ Gilbride,
09:17played by a brilliant Justin Long,
09:19who owns and manages the rental from California.
09:21Fired for being a big old creep to his co-stars,
09:25he makes the cross-state journey to inspect the place,
09:27before he can sell it to cover his legal costs.
09:29The film then pivots to a creature feature flick,
09:33as AJ uncovers the subterranean maze under the house,
09:36where he finds Tess,
09:37and has to fight dirty,
09:38to make it back out with his life intact.
09:40we'll be right back.
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