MovieChat Forums > Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (2009) Discussion > Doomed for today's audience (possible sp...

Doomed for today's audience (possible spoiler)


I first saw the original on TV about 40 years ago (I'm very old!) and was wowed by the twist. It was on TV again recently and I got my wife to watch it and she guessed it easily. The problem is, at the time, a twist ending was the exception rather than the rule. I think audiences were more inclined to take a film at face value and so were able to be truly surprised. Nowadays there isn't much that hasn't been tried, and twist endings have become very ho-hum: it takes a lot to surprise a savvy 21st century audience who either know ahead of time there is a twist, or will watch a film such as this expecting there to be one. Therefore I can't see this being anything but disappointing, but I will give it a try.

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> a savvy 21st century

Are you kidding me? Then again recollect Transformers 2 gross revenue - that will surely wake you up. This movie at least has a good plot, nowadays few movies can boast about that.

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I meant more that audiences today have seen it all before rather than referring to their intelligence, but point taken!

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This version is actually more plausible than the first, and even though it's easy to figure out early on, it still pays off as a pretty good movie.

Revenge is a dish that best goes stale.

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Maybe it was purposely made easier to figure out what the twist was going to be in this version, but I was genuinely shocked by it in the old movie. Back in those days it was practically unheard of for the main character (played by a big star who always plays the good guy) to turn out to have been the villain all along. I was totally expecting the murderer to be the father until he died and then I even thought it might be the DA and that Dana would be reunited with Joan with violin music in the backdrop. So nowadays it might be a cop out and an insult to the audience to have such an ending, but 50 years ago it woud have been the most common cop out to have him be pardoned and live happily ever after. It was actually quite a daring and unconventional ending for the time, since back then you knew when you sat down to see movie, in which the protagonist isn't an anti-hero that it would all work out fine for him in the end.

I'm here, Mr. Man, I can not tell no lie and I'll be right here 'till the day I die

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99 out of 100 people who claimed they saw the final twist coming (and hadn't seen the original, and didn't even know this was a remake) are lying... there is no way that could have been foreseen by the average viewer...

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