Crazy, Stupid, Love builds a smart, messy story about divorce and second chances that feels refreshingly honest about how relationships actually fall apart. The film lets Steve Carell's midlife crisis play out with real awkwardness, while Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling create one of the decade's most believable romantic connections through sharp dialogue and actual chemistry. Then the final act decides every character needs to end up paired off in neat little bows, complete with a grand gesture speech that reduces all that complexity into greeting card sentiment. The forced happy resolution makes you forget how good the movie was when it trusted adults to handle complicated feelings. | © Warner Bros. Pictures
Gerard Butler plays a grieving father who dismantles the justice system from inside a prison cell, and for most of the runtime, nobody can touch him. Law Abiding Citizen makes you root for someone you probably shouldn't, forcing uncomfortable questions about whether the system deserves to survive. That moral ambiguity is the whole point, or at least it should have been. Instead, the third act loses its nerve, wrapping everything up in a clean resolution that buries every provocative idea the film built. | © The Weinstein Company
Not every story deserves a happy ending, and sometimes the wrong one can undo everything a film spent two hours building. These are the movies that were heading somewhere honest and interesting before someone flinched at the last minute and softened the landing.
