Very good film, but bad ending.

There's about three different endings. I think the one you saw was also my least favorite and brought down the film for me. There's a video on youtube, check it out. It has all the endings.

Yeah there is one where he lives and gets back together with his wife and the end of that scene makes me love the movie even more..

I had the same feeling about this movie. It started out so promising. John Cusack and Samuel L Jackson had this great discussion, the dialogue was very good. The premise was an oldie but a goodie with just the right "twists" to make it interesting. Then about 2/3 through, it was like the writer quit and they had to figure out a way to wrap it up. Dreadful ending. It was a waste of some very good actors and some terrific earlier scenes. Maybe money was tight? 6/10

There are at least 3 different endings.

Mike dies in a fire in the room
Mike survives, and when he listens to a tape recording of himselfhe hears his daughter's voice, and his wife hears it too.
Same as the 2nd ending, but his wife doesn't hear his daughters voice.

I assume you saw the first. I think that was the best ending.

What bothered me the ending(s) was that they were basically going for two things: one, that Cusack was trapped in a Groundhogs Day hell until he committed suicide ('express checkout'); two, that he had to sacrifice himself before his wife was lured into 1408.

I think the movie would have been much stronger if they had only stuck to one of those ideas.

For one, while being trapped in an endlessly repeating hour of torment sounds scary, it sort of deflates the tension from the end of the movie. Like, the whole time there's this ticking countdown until his hour is up and he'll be dead. Then it counts to zero and just... rolls back over? Talk about anti-climactic. Sure, facing endless torment is a scary concept, but the way it's portrayed is a moment of low tension, almost a relief -- like when someone in a Groundhog Day time loop dies horribly and wakes up up safe in their bed. At a point in the film that should have been super grim, Cusack looked fine, the hotel looked fine. Everything looked fine!

In the story, the world opened into another dimension, revealing the true nature of the room, as this hungry entity bathed in yellow light, speaking in an electric buzzing, slowly approached him. He was going to be consumed by this hungry malevolent *thing*. That felt like a truly dire moment, where he had seconds to react (and light himself on fire).

Here it's like, well... time for another hour of this?

It's like they knew that was a problem, so they added on top of the time loop the ticking timer element of his wife approaching 1408. That in itself could have been a good ending, showing Cusack changing from a man who leaves his wife after the death of their child without so much as an explanation (she doesn't even know if they were separated on the webcam call), to a man who'd burn himself alive to protect his wife. But that idea is undercut by the Groundhog Day element. He's not JUST sacrificing himself to save his wife, he's sacrificing himself to save his wife AND escape eternal torment. The two ideas occupy so much space it's hard to give either room to breathe.

Sometimes less is more, and if they had just gone with one or the other, it'd have worked a lot better for me.