Great movies that "went Hollywood" at the end

"Enemy mine" was a fascinating novel about a human and an alien standed on the same deserted planet. (It could just as well have been an american and a japanese soldier on an island in WW2.) The movie follows the novel up to a point... and then it "goes Hollywood", forgets the plot, throws in some unnecessary villains, and what could have been a first rate movie went way down the B scale.

Waterworld, a very expensive movie, bailed out just like "Enemy mine", just wasting a more expensive movie. Why does this happen so often: You spend billions of dollars on special effects on a 1$ script? Opportunity wasted.

Despite a less fascinating theme than the wonderful "Terminator" and "Predator", "Commando" really keeps me on my toes for a significant part of the movie. The hero must keep up with the bad guys in a terrific tempo, always being on their tails but never allowing them to alert the others... until it Goes Hollywood with a tedious shootout sequence with absolutely nothing memorable except special effects and stunts. But the first half of the movie is great!

I kind of liked most of this movie. It isn't a perfect take on racism and refugees since it can't really handle its setting well, but it was OK... until they freaked out to "playing safe" with a boring action ending.

I don't know why people like these blue elves so much. Anyway, it tells a story about colonialism, a bit too over-obvious for my taste (the "shame on you white man" message is all over the place) but then we have to have an epic battle at the end which feels just like Star Wars 2 or 3 (the prequel ones): Cheesy, unrealistic, unconvincing and more interested in selling video games than telling a story.

Movies "went Hollywood" even back then. "Ten little indians" or "And then there were none" is arguably Agatha Christie's darkest novel, with an amazing ending. Hollywood couldn't do that, and went into a slapped-on romantic ending instead. I know movies are "adaptations" so they are expected to make some changes, but I insist that a movie that misses the main point of the story didn't do it right.

This movie is partially great, partially awful and definitely "goes Hollywood" at the end. The best parts are about survival in a world being attacked by totally superior aliens. The hero can not ever afford to try to take the fight, he must run and hide, and also try to survive among panicking people ready to kill for anything. And, at the extreme, the hero may have to hurt innocent people just for saving himself. That hurts but the conflict is what makes it touching. So far, great!

The hero'es family problem is mostly an annoying artifact for most of the movie... but gets a lot worse at the Hollywood ending. Yes, the ending goes seriously astray into the world of popcorn. Right after the most touching and disturbing events in the movie, suddenly the hero becomes a daredevil who will do incredible things attacking the aliens that up to then were superior and hopeless to defeat. Even at the end, when the original conclusion comes, we can't just get to that without a little bang-bang. And then that awful ending when it turns out that the family of the hero have been TOTALLY unaffected by the holocaust and are perfectly safe in their home.

I have seen the original ending of this movie, and in this case I was pretty happy with it "going Hollywood", not because the new ending was better but because the original one would be too scary and tragic. They did waste an ending that would have been iconic for a rather cheap and simple one, but I can really feel how bad it would feel to have the funny comedy go so far down a hill that steep. I really can't decide on right or wrong here. The original ending is so deeply tragic that it would be hard to take... but it was also great.

Here we have a movie "going Hollywood" in a way that I must accept. The original story was gory, violent and extremely sadistic. The movie is light-hearted and funny. Would we be happier with the hero slaughtering the entire police force and then getting murdered himself by the heroine, instead of dancing with the police and ending up hero and self-content? Not to mention how much better the movie handles the mask being "the mask of Loki" - who is the god of mischief, not evil! No, this "going Hollywood" was for the better!

I ask myself if this movie is unsuitable for the list... since the "bad ending" is more or less half of the entire movie! But that is since absolutely nothing happens (except awfully predictable and cheesy nonsense action) in that half while all the interesting things happen in the first. But that first part is pretty well done, you get very close to the characters and (unlike the ending) all characters are clear and motivated. So it has a loooong Hollywood popcorn ending after a quite good first half.

Well, I do realize that the latter part has, to various degree, high production values, some scenes has some beauty, before the tedious fighting starts. But then... The worst part comes after "you didn't think it was going to be that easy" when it goes totally loony.

Why does this funny movie end so bluntly, with a sudden consolidation between the ruthless husband and the mistreated wife, plus a clumsy joke as punchline? There is a rather obvious better ending. I think the producers bailed out of the idea of breaking marriages, so they tack it together at last minute to avoid criticism.

Fortunately there is a newer movie doing this right, "The secret life of Archie's wife".

The ending of this movie felt sooo wrong. It felt like if it was building towards something else... and then I found out that it was! The ending was originally different, and a whole lot more interesting, a big step towards the good movie I thought the movie could have been.

"There can be only one", and the one is really Sean Connery, but thanks to him, the movie works all the way... except for the sorry excuse for an end. What was the point in the Gathering, fighting until only one remains? Well, I can see much better ways to round it off than this, but my guess is that the movie Went Hollywood, and scrapped a good but controversial ending for a quickly slapped-on easy way out. Again!

This action movie goes astray at the end much like Commando and Kill Bill 1, with a good first half and then the movie just falls apart into empty action. This movie is really as tight as the hero itself for a significant part of the movie, but the end is just a sequence of unmotivated action scenes. So the movie runs out of steam, totally. Did they run out of money so they had to slap together a cheap ending? I don't know, but it sure feels like it.

I enjoyed this movie very much, but I have learned that it was originally much darker, most likely more true to its origin. It is pretty dark as it is; could I handle the original?

This one is questionable in the list. Not that it didn't "go Hollywood", complete with a death+revival scene, but because the script is pretty rotten from the start. The whole movie is really only special effects, with ill-fitting scenery which looks like a mix of Star Wars and LOTR. Just make it look amazing. And yes, lots of good CGI all over the place, and a paper-thin script.

Granted that you don't take this too seriously, it is a pretty fun action comedy, until it ruins the whole thing by messing it up, "going Hollywood" really badly. But the earlier parts are fun. I especially liked the scene when Hancock takes his lessons all too literaly when asking a woman permission to touch her in order to save her life.