Shoot the Shaggy Dog/Film: Difference between revisions

* In ''[[The Strangers]],'' {{spoiler|the titular villains manage to overpower and kill the lead characters}}.

** {{spoiler|Subverted. Yes, the villains stabbed Kristen and James seemingly to death. However, Kristen turns out to still be alive! At first glance, you might think that makes no sense. However, Dollface showed feelings of guilt. It can be inferred that she was the one who was supposed to stab Kristen to death, but since she didn't have the stomach for it right then, she actually didn't try that hard to kill her}}!

* ''[[Buried]]''.

* ''Rocket Attack USA'', a 1960s propaganda piece featured on ''[[Mystery Science Theater 3000]]''. The heroes manage to infiltrate a Soviet missile base, but the missile launches anyway (with ''hilariously'' awful special effects) and wipes out New York. "We cannot let this be... THE END."

* In ''[[Chinatown]]'', the protagonist spends most of the movie investigating the murder of the head of the water department, uncovering a rather complicated conspiracy in the process. He eventually discovers the villain, who's revealed to be so evil that he even raped his daughter and fathered a child by her but In the end he gets away with everything, taking custody of his incestuous grand-daughter at the same time, and the police shoot the protagonist's love interest dead as she attempts to flee with the girl. As the famous quote goes: ''"Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown."''

** Supposedly, the original script had a happy ending with the the [[Big Bad]] being shot, and Jake getting the girl, but [[Roman Polanski]] insisted on this sort of ending. Which becomes ''incredibly'' creepy when you consider Polanski raped at least one teenaged girl in real life.

* "The only thing that's changed[...] is that a few ineffectual people have died." Yep, that just about sums up Robert Redford's ''[[Jeremiah Johnson]]''...

* ''Sha Po Lang'' (''Killzone'' in the US) is a Hong Kong police movie that pretty much ends with {{spoiler|all of the cops dying. Including the [[Badass]] and [[The Captain]]}}. Fortunately, the [[Big Bad]] doesn't get away unscathed either. He kills the [[Badass]] cop by throwing him out the window of his skyscraper....and right on top of the car the [[Big Bad]]'s wife and baby were waiting in. ''Ouch.''

* ''Epic Movie'' ends with the four lead characters being inexplicably flattened by a runaway water wheel, making the whole movie pointless. Even more so than it already was.

** Well, it's a [[Seltzer and Friedberg]] movie. What can you expect?

* One word: ''[[Bulworth]]''. Five words: Rapping politician, {{spoiler|meet sniper bullet. Yes, in a ''comedy''. And he ordered the hit on himself!}}

** Actually, {{spoiler|Bulworth was shot by an insurance lobbyist over one of his campaign points. Halle Berry was the hitman hired to kill him and she called it off herself.}}

** This ending was tacked on after test-audiences griped about the original, far more ambiguous, version.

* The last half hour or so of ''[[The Descent (film)|The Descent]]'' is an extended version of this trope, as it's implied that if you can't stay together as a cooperating pack [they can't] the only way to be [[Badass]] enough to get out of the cave is to go crazy and become as vicious as the crawlers. {{spoiler|Also, in the UK ending, everyone dies. At least Sarah regains her humanity at the last minute... by choosing to stay with the hallucination of her dead daughter and apparently accept death.}} Hooray!

* This trope is deliberately invoked by the film ''[[Gallipoli]]'' in order to deliver an anti-war [[Aesop]]. In it, two young Australian men go to great lengths to join the army during World War 1, go through some training that doesn't seem to be taking the war seriously (for example, their drill sergeant gives them a lecture on contraception), and, in the final three minutes of the film, the characters actually go to war and are promptly killed. Roll credits.

** In the original script, the main character was meant to be shot and killed within a minute of him stepping onto Gallipoli beach. The worst part is that the film is closer to what actually happened than most war films.

* ''[[Legends of the Fall]]''. Several ineffectual people end up dying, including most of the Ludlow family, and the tragic heroine. The protagonist himself, in exile and old age, gets eaten by a bear at the end.

* Averted before release in ''[[Rambo|First Blood]]'' (the first ''[[Rambo]]'' film). The ending, as originally taken from the novel (yes, [[Adaptation Displacement|there was a novel]]), scripted and filmed, had John Rambo dying in the closing scenes by indirect suicide. He pulls a gun out of Trautman's jacket, places it in Trautman's hand, and moves the hand to point the gun at him, and presses Trautman's finger against the trigger. Test audiences hated it, so the ending was reshot with Trautman convincing Rambo to turn himself in (paving the way for the sequels).

* ''[[Titus Andronicus (theatre)|Titus]]'' - with Anthony Hopkins, based on the play by [[William Shakespeare]] ... Let's just say that it inspired the {{spoiler|Scott Tenorman episode of ''[[South Park]]''}} and leave it at that.

* ''[[Se7en]]'' Detectives Mills and Summerset {{spoiler|achieve exactly nothing, and indeed are an essential part of the serial killer's master plan. John Doe kills Mills's wife, prompting Mills to kill him, leading to Mills being arrested.}}

* ''[[Drag Me to Hell]]'': {{spoiler|the old gypsy dies (but of natural causes), the demon escapes, and our heroine, who doesn't deserve it in the least, gets, well, dragged to Hell.}}

** And don't forget {{spoiler|the medium who waited 40 years for a chance of redeeming her failure to save a young boy by meeting the Lamia again and killing it. Her assistant screws up the plan due to having a lousy aim, she fails to break the protagonist's curse and she ends up dead for her efforts.}}

* What else would you expect from ''[[The Grey Zone]]'', a Holocaust movie whose main characters are Sonderkomandos (the Jews in Nazi death camps whose chores included leading other Jews into the gas chambers and then burning their bodies afterward), a Jewish doctor who works for Josef Mengele ... and Mengele himself?

* This trope is displayed in the movie ''[[Knowing]]'' starring Nicholas Cage, {{spoiler|most notably in the complete and utter futility of John's (Cage) obsession with the numerical code, and later, his attempts to save his son and Abby. Further, Diane, Abby's mother, dies while attempting to rescue the children from the Strangers who are actually able to save them, and who were planning on doing so without the interference of either parent. Oh, and the Earth [[Apocalypse Wow|literally gets burned to a crisp.]]}}

** This is pretty much par for the course in anything having to do with the Warhammer 40,000 universe though.

* ''[[The Omen]]''. {{spoiler|Everybody dies, except Damien the Antichrist.}}

* ''The Warlords''. {{spoiler|The three main characters (and a woman that two of them fought over) die in vain as it is revealed they were only being used as pawns by corrupt politicians to do their dirty work.}}

** A bit of [[Truth in Television]] considering it is based on historical figures.

** ''[[Monty Python's Life of Brian]]'' - Loosely based on the life of Jesus Christ, you know from the start that the story can't possibly end well. Of course, there's somewhat of a {{spoiler|[[Pet the Dog]] moment}} at the very end to [[Incredibly Lame Pun|brighten]] it up".

** And ''[[Monty Python's The Meaning of Life]]'': {{spoiler|We are all shaggy dogs, because life has no meaning. Now, piss off!}}. That pretty much also sums up everything the group's done during its long existence, and is the last film they ever made as a group.

** Yes and no. David was trying to become a real boy so he could get his mother to love him. He does not achieve the goal of becoming a real boy. However, it turns out that he did not need to achieve this goal anyway. He does get one day of happiness with his mother and she tells him before she dies that she loves him and always has. He dies shortly afterwards (Why? Well, maybe he ran out of battery juice or maybe by that point he had gotten everything he wanted and so he 'shut down' as a result of this). So the ending does not quite qualify as [[Shoot the Shaggy Dog]], because David got what he truly wanted in the end. Also, he went to "...that place where dreams are born" (i.e. the afterlife). That should be impossible for a robot that is not human to achieve. But the fact that he did indicates that he did become human in a sense. So he ended up achieving more than he set out to do, which is another reason the ending does not quite qualify as [[Shoot the Shaggy Dog]]. It does, however, qualify for Fridge Horror when you consider what David has done to his mother to achieve this.

* ''[[Rosemary's Baby|Rosemarys Baby]]''. All of Rosemary's attempts to escape her husband and the Satanic cult he's allied with before she gives birth fail completely, and she gives birth in their clutches. Not that it would've made the slightest bit of difference if any of her escape attempts had succeeded since her baby {{spoiler|is Satan's child, the Anti Christ.}} For all the difference it made, [[It Makes Sense in Context|Rosemary might as well've wolfed down the entire ice cream the night before her baby's conception, and been a blindly trusting idiot afterwards]] (not that she really is a blindly trusting idiot, mind you, it just would've made no difference if she was).

** Doesn't quite count. Although Willis was mislead into attempting the action that led to his death in the end with the belief that he was saving the world, his real purpose was not to save the world but merely to locate the virus so that a scientist could go back into the past, collect a sample of the virus and then develop a vaccine so that people living underground in the (futuristic) present could return to the surface and reclaim the world from nature. Thus, his mission and purpose was considered successful.

* ''[[Black Swan]]'': Nina goes progressively more insane over the course of the movie, and seems on the verge of some kind of breakthrough at the end, only to {{spoiler|die from a self-inflicted wound}} after her first performance. Of course, given the [[Unreliable Narrator|aforementioned insanity]], it's impossible to know how much of the movie is real and how much is only in Nina's head, thus making the story potentially even more pointless.

* ''[[Bat*21]]'': An Air Force [[Big Damn Heroes|Para Rescue]] team attempt to extract Lt. Colonel Hambleton after he is shot down over Vietnam, {{spoiler|but their helicopter is shot down, and the entire crew is killed soon after, either by being shot or [[Kick the Dog|being made to walk through a minefield.]]}}

* ''Mad City'' (starring John Travolta) had an ending like this. The protagonist spends the whole film trying a desperate (but admittedly stupid) move to get his job back. In the end, it not only doesn't work, but he commits suicide to boot.

 

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