When the hero and villain ruin each other's plans.
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00:00It's generally expected in movies that the climax will see the hero finally triumph over
00:05the villain, sending everyone home with the warm fuzzies, right?
00:09But of course it'd be mighty boring if all films aggressively followed that crowd-pleasing
00:14structure, so it's refreshing when filmmakers decide to adventurously stray from it.
00:19And so, as a sequel of sorts to a recent list of ours on movies where the hero and villain
00:24both win, which you can go and check out later, we have the opposite.
00:28So I am Gareth, this is WhatCulture, and here are ten movies where the good guy and bad
00:33guy both lose.
00:3410.
00:35The Dark Knight
00:36The Dark Knight ends with the Joker being captured by Batman, and failing in his plan
00:41to make two fairies' worth of people blow each other up.
00:44Seemingly confirming that Gotham's heart hasn't been entirely corrupted.
00:48A loss for the Clown Prince of Crime and a big ol' W for the Caped Crusader, then?
00:53Well, not quite.
00:54The film still concludes with Batman having watched the Joker kill Rachel Dawes, corrupt
00:59Harvey Dent, and in turn annihilate Batman's reputation by forcing him to take the blame
01:04for Dent's murders.
01:05Oh, and the Joker even makes Batman break his no-kill policy, too, when he kills Dent
01:11during the movie's climax in order to save Jim Gordon's son.
01:15On one hand, the Joker didn't claim Gotham's soul, but he sure as hell left some major
01:19scars on its body, and on Batman himself.
01:23We can definitely call this one a draw.
01:259.
01:26I Saw the Devil
01:27Kim Ji-Woon's stunningly disturbing thriller I Saw the Devil follows Kim Soo-Hyun, an NIS
01:33agent who embarks on a tireless quest for vengeance after his fiancée is murdered by
01:38serial killer Jang Kyung-Chul.
01:40The story indeed ends with Soo-Hyun exacting nasty revenge on Kyung-Chul, placing him in
01:46a guillotine which is triggered when his son and elderly parents pay him a visit, decapitating
01:51him in front of them.
01:52A fitting end for a serial killer, probably, though the final scene, where a still-traumatised
01:57Soo-Hyun breaks down in the street, makes it clear that he's won nothing and gained
02:02no closure from killing him.
02:04He's instead gone to depraved depths he didn't know possible, needlessly traumatising
02:09Kyung-Chul's family and entirely losing himself in the process, while left with the
02:14empty realisation that murdering Kyung-Chul brought him no peace whatsoever.
02:18If thrillers about the futility of revenge are a dime a dozen, few have conveyed that
02:23message as powerfully as I Saw the Devil, bringing both its psychotic antagonist and
02:28anguished protagonist to one of cinema's grimmest ever stalemates.
02:328.
02:33On Her Majesty's Secret Service If No Time to Die recently served up an example
02:38of a movie where the hero and villain both manage to succeed in their operating goals,
02:43the criminally underappreciated On Her Majesty's Secret Service does quite the opposite.
02:47As expected for any Bond film, 007 manages to eventually foil Blofeld's plan to hold
02:53the world's food supplies to ransom, destroying his luxurious lair.
02:58A pretty clear loss for Blofeld, right?
03:00But in one of the series' most shocking moments, the epilogue offers up a nasty final
03:05sting.
03:06As after Bond marries Tracy, Blofeld and Irma Bunt drive past and riddle her with bullets,
03:11killing her.
03:12It's unquestionably the most jarringly melancholic ending to any Bond film, ensuring that while
03:18Blofeld's plan has been stopped, he got the consolation prize of completely ruining
03:22Bond's happy ending.
03:23We've never seen 007 look this lost and defeated before, not even when he was looking
03:28at a barrage of incoming missiles at the end of No Time to Die.
03:327.
03:33Glass M. Night Shyamalan's Glass was the hotly anticipated
03:36conclusion to the filmmakers' East Rail 177 trilogy, preceded by Unbreakable and Split.
03:43And boy, Shyamalan sure didn't want to just give the audience what they wanted here.
03:47Instead, offering up a subversive and intensely divisive finale nobody could have seen coming.
03:52What a twist.
03:53The three-way dance between villains The Horde and Mr Glass and hero The Overseer culminates
03:58in all three ending up dead.
04:00The Horde attacks and mortally wounds Mr Glass before being shot dead by a SWAT team, and
04:05The Overseer gets drowned by another SWAT officer in a pothole.
04:09The three main characters on both sides of the equation all lose then.
04:13But the real villains of the piece are the secret society attempting to suppress the
04:16existence of superhumans, led by Dr Ellie Staple.
04:21While Staple succeeds in killing the three supers, even she can't claim a victory given
04:25that the final scene sees her organisation being exposed to the masses by The Horde's
04:29friend Casey, Mr Glass' mother and The Overseer's son Joseph.
04:34And though this trio manages to bring the supers' murders to light, they're still
04:38bereaved, so it's tough to really call their endings a win either.
04:42No one loses here, folks, just in varying flavours of suck.
04:45What a lovely conclusion.
04:466.
04:47Seven Samurai
04:48Akira Kurosawa's seminal Seven Samurai follows a group of desperate farmers, who enlist a
04:54group of seven Ronin to take out the bandits who plot to steal their crops.
04:59While the Samurai epic concludes with the bandits indeed being fended off, it comes
05:03at a huge cost for the Ronin, with four of their number dying in the battle, leaving
05:08just three alive.
05:09But if the point hasn't been hammered home yet, the final scene makes it abundantly clear
05:13that the Samurai did not win here.
05:16Kanbei unforgettably tells Shichiroji, in the end we lost this battle too.
05:20I mean, the victory belongs to those peasants, not to us.
05:23The crops may have been saved, but that provides little salve for the Samurai, who mourn their
05:28fallen and remain very much without purpose.
05:31All while the villagers blissfully sing and plant their crops, with little recognition
05:35of the sacrifices made for them.
05:375.
05:38The Irishman
05:40The Irishman serves as a brilliant companion piece to Goodfellas, stripping away all the
05:44sexy flashiness and lingering instead on the empty inevitability of a criminal's life.
05:50On one hand, the FBI never learns the location of Labour Union leader Jimmy Hoffa's body,
05:55a mystery which remains up in the air to this very day.
05:59And on the other, though hitman Frank Sheeran lives to a ripe old age, he outlives all of
06:04his friends while being a pariah to his own family, especially daughter Peggy who realises
06:09that he killed Hoffa.
06:10As a result, the film's chilling coda sequence sees Frank destined to end his life alone
06:14in a nursing home, deprived of contact with those he cares about most, and set to be lost
06:19to time in short order.
06:21All in all, this was a brilliant riposte to decades of accusations that Scorsese has spent
06:26his career glamorising the gangster's life, instead flipping the script and showing what
06:30happens if a mobster is lucky enough to become elderly.
06:344.
06:35A Simple Plan
06:36Sam Raimi's criminally underappreciated thriller A Simple Plan revolves around brothers
06:40Hank and Jacob Mitchell, who along with Jacob's pal Lou discover a crashed plane with a bag
06:46containing $4.4 million in cash.
06:49To be fair, Raimi's film is a morally soupy parable where true good and bad folk are tough
06:54to come by.
06:55Hank certainly makes his own fair share of mistakes, but is nevertheless the character
06:59we're supposed to root for as the trio's pact to keep the money a secret swiftly goes
07:03awry.
07:04Towards the film's end, the avalanche of bad decisions catches up with the trio.
07:08Jacob kills Lou to save his brother, and Hank subsequently kills Jacob at his own guilt-riddled
07:13request.
07:14But at least Hank still has the money, right?
07:16Nope, he learns from the FBI that the money was marked, rendering it useless and ensuring
07:21Hank would have been arrested had he spent any of it.
07:24As a result, he burns the money and ends the story haunted by the trail of death and deceit
07:29the whole debacle caused.
07:30As for the actual card-carrying villain of the piece, criminal Vernon Bukowski, to whom
07:35the money belongs, things don't go well for him either, as he's shot and killed
07:39by Hank also.
07:40Losers everywhere you look.
07:423.
07:43The Favourite
07:44Truly likeable characters are also in desperately short supply in Yorgos Lanthimos' The Favourite.
07:49But at least at the start, we're certainly led to root for the downtrodden Abigail, as
07:53she and cousin Sarah compete to become the favoured companion of Queen Anne.
07:57By film's end, the lines between good and bad are almost impossibly blurred.
08:02Though it's safe to say that the outcome for all three main characters is basically
08:06disastrous.
08:07Abigail ultimately triumphs over Sarah, who is exiled by Anne due to Abigail's scheming.
08:12But Abigail soon comes to appreciate that being the favourite isn't all it's cracked
08:15up to be, leaving her bored and, once Anne realises Abigail isn't quite who she thought,
08:20thoroughly humiliated.
08:21As for Anne, she's horribly ill by film's end, never got the expected reconciliation
08:27with Sarah, and now knows how cruel and insincere Abigail can truly be.
08:32Everyone loses then, hooray!
08:342.
08:35The Departed
08:36Scorsese strikes again, this time with his best picture-winning masterpiece The Departed,
08:40which reworks the ending from its inspiration, 2002's classic Hong Kong thriller Infernal
08:46Affairs, to prevent the villain from winning.
08:48Rather than have undercover cop Billy Costigan be killed in the film's climax and police
08:53spy Colin Sullivan get away with it, as happens to their equivalent characters in Infernal
08:58Affairs, things go a little bit differently.
09:00Indeed, Costigan is suddenly shot and killed during his final confrontation with Sullivan,
09:05and though it at first appears that Sullivan's going to get away scot-free, the final scene
09:10has Costigan's incensed colleague, Dignam, wait for Sullivan in his apartment and shoot
09:15him dead.
09:16There are no winners here.
09:18On the hero's side, Costigan dies, and Dignam is clearly left completely broken by the deaths
09:23of both him and Captain Queedon, while on the villain's team, Sullivan and mob boss
09:27Frank Costello also both die.
09:29Death, death everywhere you look.
09:321.
09:33Death Sentence
09:34James Wan's Death Sentence wasn't well-received upon original release in 2007, but its esteem
09:39has since grown with general audiences, graduating into something of a gonzo cult classic.
09:45The scuzzy revenge flick stars Kevin Bacon as Nick Hume, a father who becomes a vigilante
09:50after his son is murdered by a gang member.
09:52Although the film ends with Nick killing gang leader Billy, as with I Saw the Devil,
09:57Nick's crusade comes at a massive personal and spiritual cost.
10:01By the end of the story, Nick's wife Helen has also been killed, his remaining son is
10:05seriously injured, and he's left waiting to be arrested for his revenge spree.
10:09Hell, the extended ending makes it even worse by having Nick die from his wounds.
10:14Even for the standards of revenge but at what cost endings, this one really, really emphasises
10:19the notion that Nick played a massive self-owned by trying to take matters into his own hands.