TO THE LIMIT (1995)
So, before we even get into this fucking movie, I feel I need to explain what To the Limit actually is, because I watched it and spent most of the runtime asking that very question.
Is it an action movie?
Is it softcore?
Is it a stunt reel?
Is it a pyrotechnician’s résumé?
Is it a CIA conspiracy thriller written by somebody who read a bunch of John le Carré novels — but apparently only one chapter from each?
Is it Quentin Tarantino’s forgotten inspiration for Kill Bill?
Or is it simply an elaborate scheme devised by Joey Travolta to get Anna Nicole Smith to writhe around on top of him?
The answer, somehow, is:
Yes.
FIRST: I ACCIDENTALLY MADE MIKE WATCH A SEQUEL
Which violates one of our rules this year.
Except I am invoking the Filmjitsu Emergency Exception because I had absolutely no idea this was a sequel, and apparently the movie itself barely knows.
To the Limit is technically a sequel to a 1993 movie called Da Vinci’s War, also directed by Raymond Martino and starring Joey Travolta as Frank DaVinci and Michael Nouri as Thomas “China” Smith.
But here’s the important thing:
The original wasn’t even a PM Entertainment production.
So this isn’t exactly The Godfather Part II. It’s more like several characters wandered in from another direct-to-video movie, nobody stopped them, and eventually Anna Nicole Smith showed up.
The connection is so irrelevant to understanding To the Limit that I feel completely absolved.
The Filmjitsu No-Sequel Rule remains spiritually intact.
ANNA NICOLE SMITH: NOT QUITE HER ACTING DEBUT
Something else I initially had wrong: this wasn’t technically Anna Nicole Smith’s acting debut.
She’d already appeared in The Hudsucker Proxy and had a supporting role as Tanya in Naked Gun 33⅓ in 1994.
But To the Limitwas her first starring role.
And strangely enough, the story of how she got involved makes the whole thing a little sadder and considerably more interesting.
Director Raymond Martino later recalled that they sent Anna the script in 1995. According to him, she read it and called back the very next day saying she wanted the part.
There was a problem.
Anna Nicole Smith was enormously famous at the time and apparently came with a price tag PM Entertainment couldn’t really afford.
Martino said her agency, William Morris, actually advised her not to make the movie.
And she did it anyway.
Why?
Because according to Martino, she told them she wanted the chance to play different characters and didn’t want to keep playing what she called “bimbos.”
So Anna Nicole looked at Colette — a CIA double agent embroiled in assassination, organized crime, government corruption and enough double-crosses to cause permanent spinal damage — and apparently thought:
Finally. A serious acting role.
And then the movie almost immediately starts finding reasons to get her naked.
Martino nevertheless remembered her very warmly and said her ambition really was to become a serious actor. So underneath all the obvious exploitation here, there does seem to have been someone genuinely trying to change the way Hollywood perceived her.
SO WHAT THE FUCK IS THE PLOT?
Okay.
Good luck.
Anna Nicole plays Colette Dubois — or Vickie Lynn, depending on what portion of the CIA labyrinth we’re currently trapped inside.
She’s a former CIA operative whose husband is murdered.
Meanwhile Joey Travolta plays Frank DaVinci, who is some combination of former mobster, businessman and Italian-American fantasy created by somebody who has never actually met an Italian-American.
Frank is getting married.
His wedding is massacred.
His wife is killed.
He survives.
Somewhere behind all of this is rogue CIA big-bad Arthur Jameson, played by Jack Bannon, who seems to possess:
An unlimited supply of assassins.
An unlimited supply of sexy female assassins.
Enough resources to orchestrate enormous international conspiracies.
And apparently about thirty-seven dollars for office space.
Because this mastermind runs his entire operation out of a tiny room decorated primarily by a swinging overhead lamp.
And I mean swinging.
That fucking lamp never stops moving.
I eventually stopped following the conspiracy and started worrying about whether somebody in Jameson’s office was going to get seasick.
THE JOHN LE CARRÉ PROBLEM
And the craziest part is that To the Limit doesn’t have too little plot.
It has about four movies’ worth of plot.
There are CIA factions.
Organized crime families.
Assassinations.
Vietnam connections.
Secret identities.
Government corruption.
Drug trafficking.
Double agents.
Double-crosses.
Double-crosses of the double-crosses.
A mysterious CD-ROM.
People revealing that they’re working for someone else.
People revealing that the person they were working for was actually working for someone else.
Eventually you reach the point where someone says something like, “You don’t understand who Jameson really works for,” and you just think:
No, you’re right. I don’t. And I no longer care.
It feels like someone tried to explain Three Days of the Condor after suffering a traumatic brain injury.
AND YET — THE ACTION IS WEIRDLY LEGITIMATE
Here’s where things get interesting.
Because every once in a while this cheap, insane movie suddenly does something that looks dangerous as hell.
Cars flip.
Things explode.
People get launched through the air.
There are squibs everywhere.
Vehicles smash into other vehicles.
And I’m watching this thinking:
Where the fuck did THIS come from?
And that’s where we need to talk about PM Entertainment.
WHAT THE FUCK WAS PM ENTERTAINMENT?
PM stands for its founders:
Richard Pepin and Joseph Merhi.
Hilariously, this ties right into our recent episodes that have picked the bones of Canon Films: Bolero and Gor (not to mention Superman IV. Menahim Golan and Yorum Globus had a couple other guys pick up the low-budget-yet-ambitious mantel in Richard Pepin and Joseph Merhi.
They came out of an earlier company called City Lights Entertainment and formed PM around 1989, right as the VHS rental market was becoming an enormous business.
And PM figured out an extremely simple formula.
Don’t spend the money on prestige.
Don’t spend it on enormous sets.
Don’t spend it on months of shooting.
Don’t necessarily even spend it on the screenplay.
Put the money on the screen.
Action.
Cars.
Explosions.
Gunfire.
Stunts.
Sex.
A recognizable actor on the VHS box.
Done.
One history of the company places the average PM budget at roughly $350,000, although budgets grew substantially later in the company’s life. People who worked there have described extremely small crews and incredibly fast shooting schedules.
And that explains To the Limit better than any plot summary possibly could.
Because this movie will give you:
A room that looks like somebody rented it by the hour.
Then blow up a fucking car.
A scene that appears to have been decorated with furniture from a dentist’s waiting room.
Then a helicopter.
Anna Nicole Smith standing in a location that looks like somebody’s condo.
Then THREE CARS EXPLODE.
It’s filmmaking by budget triage.
GARY DANIELS BASICALLY CONFIRMS THIS
Actor and martial artist Gary Daniels made a bunch of movies for PM, and years later he described their philosophy pretty beautifully.
His basic point was that PM knew exactly what sold these movies, so that’s where they spent the money.
He has said the stories weren’t always the greatest, but the action was where PM concentrated its resources.
Daniels also recalled going with the company to Cannes, where international buyers would actually applaud the action sequences during screenings.
In another interview, he described shoots where PM might have three separate units working simultaneously, with him bouncing between one unit where he’d fight somebody, another where he’d shoot somebody and another where he’d perform some ridiculous stunt.
Which is possibly the most PM Entertainment story imaginable.
Forget character motivation.
Gary, we need you to punch this man, shoot that man and jump out of this moving vehicle before lunch.
WHICH BRINGS US TO THE “BOX OFFICE”
There basically isn’t one.
To the Limit was released direct to video in the United States in September 1995.
Box Office Mojo lists no domestic theatrical gross.
No international theatrical gross.
No worldwide theatrical gross.
Because theatrical exhibition wasn’t really the product.
The VHS was the product.
PM even distributed the American tape itself under catalog number PM-264.
And this is important when talking about whether movies like this were “successful.”
I could not find a reliable public figure for how many copies of To the Limit sold, what Blockbuster paid for it, what its rental revenue was or exactly how much PM earned from the movie.
So anybody online giving a precise gross without documentation deserves suspicion.
But PM’s business wasn’t dependent upon selling millions of tickets to American moviegoers.
The company was making inexpensive genre movies for the global home-video marketplace.
International distributors would buy territorial rights.
Video stores needed huge quantities of new product.
And the recognizable faces, sexy box art, explosions and action scenes were all part of making a movie easy to sell before audiences ever saw it.
Gary Daniels specifically remembered this marketplace as being driven by what international buyers wanted: in the 1990s, buyers wanted action, so companies like PM made action.
And he described PM’s films as very successful internationally.
For context, this was the absolute height of the video-store economy.
Blockbuster alone ended 1996 with 5,317 stores, and its parent company reported billions of dollars in annual video and music retail revenue.
So a cheap action movie did not have to become Die Hard theatrically.
It had to make thousands of video-store buyers look at a box featuring Anna Nicole Smith holding a gun and say:
Yeah. Somebody’s renting that.
And they were probably right.
THE SOFTCORE QUESTION
Which leads to the next obvious question:
Is this basically softcore porn with explosions?
Not exactly.
But I understand why you’re asking.
Because this movie is constantly searching for plausible reasons for Anna Nicole Smith to undress.
Shower.
Sex.
Change clothes.
Get into bed.
Get out of bed.
Exist near a camera.
And this wasn’t just something we noticed thirty years later.
Quebec’s official classification database specifically described the movie’s combination of action violence with erotic scenes designed to emphasize Anna Nicole Smith’s body.
So the exploitation element isn’t really subtext.
It’s just text.
And what’s uncomfortable in retrospect is knowing that Anna apparently took this movie partly because she wanted to prove she could do something besides sex-symbol roles.
She thinks she’s starring in a CIA action thriller.
The producers know whose picture is selling the VHS.
Those are not necessarily the same movie.
BUT THEN SOMETIMES THE MOVIE BECOMES COMPLETELY AWESOME
And this is the frustrating part.
Because occasionally there’s an explosion or stunt where I genuinely thought:
Okay! That was fucking great!
And then Joey Travolta walks into frame.
I need to talk about Joey Travolta.
Joey isn’t merely the star.
He’s also credited as producer and one of the screenwriters.
So whenever you’re watching Frank DaVinci inexplicably succeed with women or become the center of another increasingly ludicrous conspiracy, remember:
Joey had a pen.
And this means that at some point Joey Travolta participated in writing scenes in which Anna Nicole Smith climbs on top of Joey Travolta.
Cinema is an extraordinarily powerful medium.
THE CAST IS ALSO PURE VIDEO-STORE SHELF ENERGY
And there are actual people in this thing!
Michael Nouri.
David Proval.
John Aprea.
Branscombe Richmond.
Rebecca Ferratti.
Kathy Shower.
Jack Bannon.
It has the exact kind of cast where you spend the entire movie pointing at the television and yelling:
THAT GUY!
But assembled in a combination that could only have occurred in approximately 1995.
AND THEN…
We arrive at the CD.
The fucking CD-ROM.
The entire conspiracy ultimately revolves around incriminating information stored on a compact disc.
Fine.
Very 1995.
Absolutely acceptable.
Until the climax.
Because Anna Nicole Smith eventually confronts Jameson.
And how does our hero finally dispatch this enormously powerful CIA mastermind who has murdered dozens of people and commanded an apparently infinite army?
Does she shoot him?
No.
Stab him?
No.
Blow him up?
Shockingly, no.
Anna Nicole Smith throws the CD at him.
And the CD…
STICKS IN HIS FUCKING FOREHEAD.
And kills him.
She murders the villain with data storage.
This man survived decades in intelligence work only to get taken out by approximately 650 megabytes.
I have seen people killed in movies with guns.
Knives.
Swords.
Explosives.
Icicles.
Corn.
A carrot.
A frozen turkey.
Jason Voorhees has killed someone with a sleeping bag.
And I still don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like:
DEATH BY CD-ROM.
IMDb’s own goofs section actually feels compelled to point out that a polycarbonate compact disc would not behave this way when thrown at a human skull.
Thank you, IMDb.
I had wondered.
AND HERE’S THE BEAUTIFUL PART
I don’t think that ending is random.
It’s actually the entire movie condensed into about four seconds.
The script says:
The CD is important.
The action department says:
Somebody needs to die.
The exploitation movie says:
Anna Nicole needs to do it.
The budget says:
We already own the CD.
And To the Limit says:
Great. Throw it into his brain.
That’s PM Entertainment.
THE PM ENTERTAINMENT RABBIT HOLE
And here’s the thing I’m genuinely excited about after watching this catastrophe:
There are dozens of these fucking things.
PM Entertainment spent the ’90s generating movies like somebody had discovered an infinite VHS cheat code.
They made:
CyberTracker.
T-Force.
Hologram Man.
Rage.
Riot.
Recoil.
The Sweeper.
Executive Target.
Alien Intruder.
Busted.
And another Anna Nicole Smith vehicle one year later:
Skyscraper.
And Skyscraper is once again directed by Raymond Martino.
So this wasn’t even Anna Nicole’s only trip through the PM machine.
There is apparently an entire parallel cinematic universe sitting on old video-store shelves that Filmjitsu has barely touched.
And remarkably, people are now actively preserving and documenting these movies.
There’s an entire podcast devoted to PM Entertainment.
Recent boutique releases have started putting movies like To the Limit and Skyscraper on Blu-ray.
Which means thirty years later people have finally looked at the cinematic legacy of Pepin and Merhi and said:
You know what? Put that shit in HD.
God bless them.
Fun fact: there’s a podcast devoted to PM Entertainment’s cinematic output! It’s called, of course, “The PM Entertainment Podcast” and it appears to be still running!
MY READ ON TO THE LIMIT
So ultimately, what the fuck is To the Limit?
I don’t think it’s merely a bad action movie.
It’s almost a perfect fossil from a very specific moment in movie history.
It’s what happens when the video-store marketplace becomes powerful enough to support an entire secondary Hollywood.
These movies didn’t need critics.
They didn’t need multiplexes.
They barely needed coherent stories.
They needed:
A face you recognized.
A title that sounded dangerous.
A VHS cover that looked good from twelve feet away.
Some nudity.
Some gunfire.
A couple cars that could be destroyed.
Foreign buyers.
Video stores.
And ninety-something minutes of content connecting all of it together.
And within those requirements, PM Entertainment seems to have developed an almost industrial filmmaking system.
Which explains why To the Limit simultaneously feels:
Incredibly cheap.
Weirdly ambitious.
Completely incompetent.
And occasionally:
Holy shit, that stunt was awesome.
FINAL THOUGHT
I went into this thinking I’d made Mike watch one of the worst action movies ever made.
I came out of it realizing I may have accidentally discovered an entire decade of future Filmjitsu assignments.
So I apologize, Mike.
Not for To the Limit.
For what may come next.
Because PM Entertainment apparently made close to a hundred fucking things.
And I now know where to find them.
Bottom Five Endings
THE ABYSS — THEATRICAL CUT (1989)
I need to qualify this one immediately because The Abyss is one of my favorite movies. Period.
But I’m specifically talking about the theatrical ending, because it takes this enormous, ambitious James Cameron movie and, right when it reaches the point where everything is supposed to come together, removes a fairly important detail:
Why any of this is fucking happening.
In the theatrical version, Bud descends into the abyss, disarms the nuclear warhead, encounters the NTIs and sends that beautiful final message to Lindsey knowing he probably isn’t coming back. The aliens save him, bring their enormous ship to the surface and essentially reveal themselves to humanity. Bud and Lindsey kiss…. And… that’s pretty much it.
I was pretty startled, because in the theater back in 1989, sitting next to my best friend with tears in my eyes at all of what I’d just experienced, I was ready for the BIG ending as I’d already read the novelization of the film. And… it was missing!
Cameron had written and actually shot a much larger ending in which the NTIs, disgusted by humanity’s violence and march toward nuclear annihilation, create enormous tidal waves and position them over the coastlines of the world. Bud’s willingness to sacrifice himself ultimately convinces them that humanity might actually be worth saving.
That changes EVERYTHING.
Suddenly the aliens aren’t merely rescuing Bud because they felt bad for he and Lindsey. The entire movie’s obsession with nuclear weapons, Cold War paranoia and humanity’s tendency toward self-destruction actually pays off.
The sequence was removed partly because the movie was already considered overlong by the studio and the visual effects weren’t ready. Cameron had contractual final cut and has said the decision ultimately belonged to him. The restored Special Edition, released in 1993, added roughly 28 minutes and finally put the tidal-wave material back where it belonged.
The Abyss was a notoriously difficult production and reportedly cost around $70 million, while earning roughly $55–60 million domestically during its original release. It won the Oscar for Visual Effects and was nominated for cinematography, sound and art direction.
So this isn’t one of my Bottom Five because James Cameron couldn’t come up with an ending.
It’s here because he came up with the right ending, shot the right ending… and then released the movie without it.
Thankfully, the Special Edition eventually fixed the problem.
But for several years, one of my favorite movies ended with me thinking:
Wait. Where’s the rest!?!
VERTIGO (1958)
This is another one where I need to state for the record:
I fucking love Vertigo.
It may be my favorite Hitchcock movie.
James Stewart is fantastic. Kim Novak is fantastic. Robert Burks’ photography is gorgeous. Bernard Herrmann’s score is one of the greatest film scores ever written. Hitchcock even gives us the famous dolly-zoom effect that became so associated with this movie that people now literally call it the Vertigo effect.
And then the movie ends like Hitchcock suddenly realized the parking meter was about to expire.
Judy finally confesses. Scottie drags her back up the bell tower, essentially forcing her to reenact Madeleine’s death. A nun suddenly appears out of the darkness, Judy panics, falls from the tower and dies.
Scottie walks to the edge.
Looks down.
And…
Good night, everybody!
That’s the end.
I understand what Hitchcock is doing.
Scottie has finally conquered his vertigo—but only at the exact moment when overcoming it becomes completely meaningless. The woman he’s obsessed over, reconstructed and psychologically tortured is dead. Again. He’s standing exactly where this entire nightmare began, only now there’s nothing left for him.
Thematically?
Great.
Emotionally?
Hitch, give me thirty fucking seconds!
And the funny thing is that Hitchcock actually did shoot an additional ending.
The Production Code Administration wanted reassurance that Gavin Elster—the guy who actually orchestrated the murder that started all of this—wouldn’t simply escape justice. So Hitchcock filmed a coda where Scottie returns to Midge’s apartment while a radio report explains that authorities are tracking Elster in Europe. Scottie and Midge then quietly have a drink together.
Hitchcock fought to get rid of it.
And honestly?
He was right.
That ending is worse.
I don’t want that ending.
I just want the ending we got to breathe for another moment before Hitchcock slams the fucking door in my face.
And considering Vertigo wasn’t particularly successful or universally adored when it first appeared—it cost around $2.5 million and earned roughly $7.3 million, then spent decades growing into its current reputation as one of Hitchcock’s masterpieces—maybe audiences needed a little time to process the whole movie, too.
I just wish Hitchcock had given Scottie about another minute to do the same.
THE VILLAGE (2004)
I know. We talked about Shymalan enough in our last episode. But honestly, I had to drop this one in here because it’s an ending that I reached and I was like “yeah, yeah. Ok. Sure.” Because by 2004, M. Night Shyamalan had trained me.
After The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs, I was no longer simply watching an M. Night Shyamalan movie.
I was looking for the fucking twist.
And with The Village, I called it.
Way too early.
I remember thinking pretty quickly:
They’re not actually living in the nineteenth century, are they?
And once that possibility entered my head, the movie basically spent the rest of its running time slowly walking toward the answer I was already waiting for.
Then Ivy finally gets beyond the woods and—sure enough—there’s the modern world.
And for me, that was a turning point with Shyamalan.
The Sixth Sense reveal made me want to immediately watch the entire movie again because suddenly everything I’d already seen meant something different.
The Village reveal made me think:
Yeah. I know.
And that’s a huge difference.
I wasn’t remotely alone in having trouble with that ending. Reviews were mixed, with Rotten Tomatoes’ critical consensus specifically identifying the twist as a disappointment, and audiences gave the film a C CinemaScore. Roger Ebert was considerably less charitable.
What’s interesting is that none of that prevented the movie from being financially successful. It cost around $60 million and made more than $256 million worldwide, including a massive $50.7 million opening weekend in the U.S.
And I too see a lot about The Village that’s good.
Roger Deakins shot the thing, so naturally it looks beautiful. James Newton Howard wrote this gorgeous, melancholy score built around violinist Hilary Hahn—and the score was good enough to receive an Academy Award nomination. The movie also has this terrific cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Bryce Dallas Howard, William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Adrien Brody, Brendan Gleeson.
But this was the movie where I stopped trusting that the surprise at the end was going to be worth spending the entire movie waiting for it.
And once a filmmaker famous for surprising you has taught you how to beat him to the surprise?
That’s a pretty serious problem.
PLANET OF THE APES (2001)
Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes already has the unenviable task of remaking a movie with one of the most famous endings in the history of cinema.
Charlton Heston discovers the Statue of Liberty.
He realizes this was Earth all along.
“You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!”
There is absolutely no way you’re topping that.
Which is fine!
You don’t have to.
Except Tim Burton’s movie apparently decided:
Fuck it. We’re gonna try.
So Mark Wahlberg defeats General Thade, escapes the ape planet, flies back through the electromagnetic storm and somehow returns to Washington, D.C.
Okay.
He walks toward the Lincoln Memorial.
Okay.
He looks up.
And Abraham Lincoln has been replaced by—
GENERAL THADE.
APE LINCOLN.
Then ape police arrive.
Ape firefighters.
Ape reporters.
Everybody’s an ape.
CUT TO BLACK.
What?
The problem isn’t merely that it’s stupid.
It’s that the movie itself has given me nowhere near enough information to understand how the fuck this happened.
The home-video material apparently offered additional explanation suggesting that Thade eventually escaped, followed Leo through the storm and somehow reached Earth at an earlier point, which helps make the mechanics slightly less insane.
But if I need a pamphlet from the DVD box to understand the final scene of your $100 million movie, the movie has failed to explain its ending.
And this thing was enormous.
It cost about $100 million and made more than $362 million worldwide, including a $68.5 million opening weekend. It had Tim Burton directing, Danny Elfman scoring it, Philippe Rousselot shooting it and a ridiculous cast including Tim Roth, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Clarke Duncan, Paul Giamatti and Kris Kristofferson.
And somehow all those people arrived at:
APE LINCOLN.
What’s especially funny is that the movie includes Charlton Heston himself, playing an ape, getting to deliver a variation on his original “damn them all to hell” line.
So everybody making this thing clearly understood how iconic the 1968 ending was.
Which makes the decision to end this movie with a completely unexplained shock twist even stranger.
The original Planet of the Apes ends by revealing something that makes you reconsider everything you just watched.
The 2001 Planet of the Apes ends by revealing something that makes you ask:
Wait—what the fuck did I just watch?
DOG DAY AFTERNOON (1975)
And finally, a movie whose ending isn’t bad.
Not even remotely.
The ending to Dog Day Afternoon is probably exactly the ending the movie needs.
I just fucking hate what happens.
Because Sidney Lumet and Al Pacino perform this incredible trick over the course of two hours.
They get you rooting for the bank robber.
Sonny and Sal have guns. They’re holding people hostage. They’re unquestionably committing a serious crime.
And yet the robbery becomes such a disaster almost immediately that Sonny stops feeling like some criminal mastermind and starts feeling like a guy whose terrible day has simply escaped containment.
The hostages start relating to him.
The crowd outside starts cheering him.
Sonny becomes this bizarre folk hero.
And slowly, against every rational part of your brain, you start thinking:
Maybe these guys can actually get away.
You know they won’t.
You know they can’t.
But by the time that limousine starts heading toward the airport, I want that fucking plane to be waiting for them.
And then they get there.
Everything suddenly becomes quiet.
The FBI agent distracts Sonny.
Friggin’ Lance Hendrickson as the driver pulls the hidden gun.
And Sal is shot in the head.
Just like that.
Sonny is arrested.
The hostages are rescued.
And this wild, funny, sweaty, chaotic circus of a movie suddenly becomes brutally ordinary.
It’s over.
And that’s exactly why the ending hurts so much.
Lumet spends the entire movie stripping away the usual artificiality of crime movies. There’s essentially no musical score whatsoever. The Elton John song at the beginning eventually reveals itself as music playing from the characters’ radio; after that, Lumet largely refuses to use music to tell us how to feel. Cinematographer Victor J. Kemper shoots it with this sweaty, immediate realism, and Dede Allen’s editing keeps the whole circus moving without making it feel slick.
Then the ending takes away the circus.
Sal gets shot.
Sonny gets handcuffed.
Reality finally catches up with them.
And, of course, the story itself was inspired by a real 1972 Brooklyn bank robbery, which makes some version of that reality impossible to escape anyway. The movie became a major success, earning somewhere around $47–50 million domestically and receiving six Oscar nominations, with Frank Pierson winning for the screenplay.
So unlike everything else on this list, I can’t really accuse Dog Day Afternoon of screwing up its ending.
Sidney Lumet knows exactly what he’s doing.
That’s the problem.
For two hours he somehow makes me believe that Sonny and Sal might get on that plane.
And then he reminds me:
Of course they aren’t.
I don’t think the ending is bad.
I just wish it weren’t right.