Morgan
I'm no super smartypants like Stephen Hawking (although my fuck-stick still works, so I've got that over ol' Rolling Thunder), but you don't have to be Hawking, Einstein or even Sajak to know that twist endings need to come at the end of a story. It's right there in the name, motherfuckers! Twist ending.
Imagine if The Usual Suspects told us who Keyser Soze was during the opening credits. Or if pre-KFC Haley Joel Osment pointed at Bruce Willis the first time he saw him in The Sixth Sense and stammered, "G-g-g-g-ghost!" How about if Fight Club started off with a shot of Edward Norton staring into a mirror and Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden smirking back at him?
Instead of being the mind-blowing modern classics that they are, all three would have sucked festering leper dong.
If you can't grok that simple-as-Simon concept, you probably shouldn't try to make a twist ending movie. And if it just so happens that your dad made one of the best artificial intelligence-focused twist ending flicks ever, you might want to stay as far the fuck away from that particular sub-sub-genre as you possibly can.
So what does Luke "Ridley Is Your Father" Scott do for his feature film directorial debut? He makes Morgan, a twist ending movie about an AI creation that gives up its twist faster than a cheerleader's cherry on prom night.
That's nepotism for you. Ridley had to earn his career by wowing the world with the likes of Blade Runner, Alien and Thelma & Louise, but sonny boy Luke, born with a silver clapper in his mouth, gets the keys to the kingdom while his cinematic training wheels are still on. And we get fucking Morgan. Balls.
At a sprawling estate secluded deep in a dense forest, a team of scientists has used genetic engineering to create a synthetic person (cough, Ex Machina, cough). The synthecant's name is Morgan (Anya Taylor-Joy "Division"). She's only five actual years old but looks about 17, is wicked smart, hella strong and has a bit of an anger management problem. Morgan kicks off Morgan by stabbing one of her scientist/keepers (Jennifer Jason "Good" Leigh) in the eye. That forces the corporate overlords to send Risk Manager Lee Weathers (Kate "To" Mara) out to evaluate whether the Morgan Project - and Morgan herself - should be terminated.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden PhD (Michelle Yeoh "Adrian") doesn't want that.
You know nothing, Lee Weathers (Rose "Bud" Leslie) doesn't want that.
Captain Character Actor (Paul "Original" Giamatti) doesn't really care one way or the other; he just wants to push Morgan's buttons.
That's a bunch of big names for a two-steps-from-Syfy-original B-movie. There's that nepotism thing again.
If Morgan had held onto its twist until the end - and it easily could have . . . until the very last scene, in fact - it would have dropped more jaws than Jennifer Lawrence and Elizabeth Warren scissoring in the middle of Times Square. As it is, you might as well call it Blade Blunder.
January 13, 2017 New video release review rather than new theatrical release review because fuck Marky Mark and Batfleck.