There is, however, a difference between a movie with a bad ending and a movie with a stupid ending. While stupid endings are bad, bad endings aren't necessarily stupid. Let's take a look at the differences between the two.
Bad Ending - An ending which is unsatisfying, not necessarily because of ambiguity, but because it fails to adequately fulfill any promises the rest of the film mat have offered.
Example: "No Country For Old Men" was very interesting up until the last half hour when the main freaking character, Josh Brolin, gets unceremoniously killed off camera and forgotten about, effectively derailing the entire narrative. Then Javier Bardem crashes his car and walks off, Tommy Lee Jones tells us about a dream he had, and the movie just ends. Not like Josh Brolin's story was interesting or anything. No, I want to hear some vague psychoanalysis of dreams. That's riveting.
Stupid Ending - An ending that insults your intelligence by expecting you to have paid no attention to the rest of the movie, or have absolutely no concern about anything making a lick of sense whatsoever.
Example: The ending of "The Book of Eli" expects us to believe that Denzel Washington not only accurately memorized the entire Bible cover to cover, word for word, but was also blind the entire movie. Yet he constantly was pulling off not only devastatingly effective kung-fu, which while highly dubious is possible, but also had him shooting a gun with pinpoint accuracy on many occasions. I'm talking drilling a guy between the eyes at 50 paces accurate here. While blind as Stevie Wonder. I guess we were supposed to believe that God himself was nudging his arm just a bit more to the left and saying "There ya go. That's a headshot right there." Why is God helping Denzel shoot people? What ever happened to "Thou shalt not kill?" I love when religious tripe contradicts itself.
You see the difference in the two? One is just disappointing, the other is enough to get you mad because you feel like you just wasted your time while the movie laughs at you for it. And I would take a bad ending over a stupid ending any day.
But what possible reason could I have for beginning this post with a diatribe about stupid endings? What possible reason indeed...
"This isn't ending well for me, is it?"
"Red Lights" is a mystery about a pair of professors/paranormal investigators, played by Cillian Murphy and Sygourney Weaver, who go around debunking supernatural claims with science and all that good stuff. Robert De Niro is a blind psychic named Simon Silver, who is apparently capable of extraordinary things including spoon bending, mind reading, and being able to make a person's heart stop. That last one is what prompted his retirement years ago, when one of his critics mysteriously dropped dead. But when he makes an unexpected comeback, the team of investigators feel it's a perfect opportunity to see if there really is more to him than gimmicks.
That's all well and good, and it is admittedly interesting to see the tricks that those phonies use to appear magical, despite the fact that most of the time it just boils down to the guy wearing an ear piece that has someone on the other end feeding him information. It's nothing too advanced, but every once in a while there's a neat little trick they expose which can provide something of a "eureka" moment if you've ever wondered how that stuff works.
There is also an emotional lynchpin with Sygourney's character, who has a son who has been in a coma for some 20 years. She's an atheist, and for her that means that she can't bring herself to take her son off of life support, because she doesn't believe there's anything afterwards. If she did believe, and she wishes that she could, she would do it in a second. But for now she'll keep waiting and hoping that he'll come back and experience the only existence he'll ever have.
I hate seeing great actors in mediocre films.
There is some admittedly really gripping and well done drama to be found in "Red Lights." Sygourney's character is full of so much pain, and she is such a dynamite actress, and always has been, that when she's given room to work she'll tear the house down around anyone else in the room. And with a great actor like Cillian Murphy, who actually has very good chemistry with her, there are the makings of some really good stuff here.
As far as De Niro goes, I'll just say what I've said in the past, even though few people share my opinion here - I find him to be just okay. He's never really done that much for me personally as an actor, but I'm not going to say that he's not good. That would be stupid and false. De Niro is a great actor. I'm just not a huge fan of his. And "Red Lights" was pretty much your average De Niro performance. If you like him in other stuff you'll like him in this. One thing he's not is inconsistent.
See that there? Sneering while blind. The guy's a master, I tell you...
So what was it about "Red Lights" that made me start off this entry so? Obviously, it was the ending. Oh my goodness. The ending was rubbish. Pure and simple. If the ending to "Red Lights" was a literal rubbish pile, it would be the finest pile of rubbish one could hope to find. Award winning rubbish, I dare say.
I don't want to get too into what happens, but suffice to say that it approaches Shyamalan-level stupidity. But it's a strange kind of stupid that doesn't really hit you until you do something foolhardy like "think about it for two seconds." Basically what the twist ending adds is a few little things earlier in the film are put into a new context, and a character's motivations are changed, which admittedly makes certain scenes make some additional sense.
However, at the same time that same character's motivations are now completely backwards and scattered on every other scene in the movie, another character's death is now either impossibly coincidental or impossibly nonsensical, and the life work of one of the main characters is now rendered pointless for no good reason. And the only possible conclusion that we are forced to draw from it all is that that character with the twist is an idiot who likes to sabotage and confuse themselves, which is easy since apparently they also have a bad case of Alzheimers.
They also drop the most emotionally gripping plot thread, the son in the coma, halfway through the movie. Fantastic. -_-
That's the kind of thing I'm talking about when I say "stupid" ending. And what almost makes it worse is that it's forced. This is not a movie that needed a twist. It would have worked far better if there hadn't been one. In fact, that could have been downright gutsy. What does that say about where we are with movies nowadays when a thriller not having a twist is actually a more shocking twist than having one?
Just...stop trying to be clever, Hollywood. You're not very good at it.
THE BOTTOM LINE - "Red Lights" is passable for the first 3/4's of the movie. The ending is so ludicrously bad that it ruins everything that came before it. Yeah, it's one of those endings. And I hate to say that because Cillain Murphy and Sygourney Weaver are two of my favorites, but this just wastes them. There may be some enjoyment to be found for some, but I'm not sure by who. Maybe De Niro fans who liked "The Village?"
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