Ass Pull / Live-Action Films

• Parodied in Adaptation., where the protagonist's twin writes a script called The Three in which it turns out the kidnapper, the victim, and the detective are all the same person. His brother points out how this doesn't make sense because — for example — there's a car chase where the detective is tailing the kidnapper who has the victim in the back seat... so if they're all one person what the hell is he doing in reality?? And yet there are still people in Hollywood who want to produce the movie. Hilariously, only a few years later, Hollywood actually did make a film with that exact same twist — Identity, which has multiple cops, killers, victims, and bystanders be alternate personalities of one another, and even the cop turns out to be a killer in disguise having killed the actual cop personality prior to the movie!
  • The French film High Tension featured the exact same twist and the exact same logical conundrums.
• In Avengers: Infinity War both Thanos and Thor had to go to the Dwarves of Nidavellir for weapons that could handle (or counter) the power of the Infinity Stones, yet in Avengers: Endgame new gauntlets are fashioned out of Tony Stark's nanotech, and they perform just as well as the one made by Eitri. It has led to some speculation on whether Stark Industries could mass produce perfect duplicates of Mjölnir or Stormbreaker.
• Batman:
  • Deliberately played for laughs in the Adam West series and Batman: The Movie, the latter of which has the following:
    Batman has an exploding shark biting his leg
    Batman: Robin! Hand me the Shark-Repellent Bat Spray!
  • Most of the movie does this. Again, in the name of comedy. The crowning example comes when Batman and Robin are magnetically trapped aboard a buoy, unable to move as a missile hurtles towards them. Smash cut to our heroes driving away in a boat, as Batman somberly reflects on the random intelligent porpoise that swam in front of the missile to save them.
  • Of course Bat Deduction is made of this.
• The independent feature Bloodletting, about a woman who tracks down a serial killer so he can show her how to kill, ends with one of the biggest Ass Pulls out there: It turns out the supposed killer the girl tracks down was not the serial killer she was looking for, but a pathetically lonely guy who pretended to be the one she was after to make her stay. They both wind up dead after the man has killed half a dozen people. He had never killed before he met her, mind you.
• Before Breaking Dawn Part II was released, the promotional materials and marketing hyped up an epic final battle that was shown in nearly every trailer and TV spot. When the film was released, the final battle turned out to be one of Alice's visions.^note And given the nature of how Alice's visions work- shape shifters are especially excluded, but they're shown participating- it would have made a simpler change from the books just to has a scuffle, however little sense it would make for trying to resolve things peacefully, over having a scene that "couldn't" happen to begin with.
• Stephen King's Cat's Eye: The original planned ending was to reveal that General the cat was Evil All Along, and he suffocates Amanda by stealing her breath. This would have turned his entire arc into a nonsensical Shoot the Shaggy Dog story packed with Fridge Logic (he follows a telepathic plea for help halfway across the country and battles an evil troll to protect a little girl, just so he could kill the kid himself?). Thankfully, the ending didn't make it into the finished film.
• A Certain Sacrifice, a film only known because it stars a pre-fame Madonna. After about 40 minutes of barely audible, badly written, badly edited, horrendously paced, confusing gibberish, it turns into a Rape and Revenge movie out of nowhere. And that's before we get to the Satanic sacrifice of the heroine's rapist.
• In the ending of Christmas Evil, the Santa Claus wannabe main character is driving a van after he knocks out his brother. Suddenly, a mob carrying Torches and Pitchforks appear before him, and he drives over a bridge... and the movie takes a sudden fantastic turn as the van keeps going, and flies into the night sky. According to the director, this is actually a Dying Dream.
• The ending of the original Cube movie where Quentin suddenly shows up and kills Leaven and Worth really comes across this way, as he'd seemingly have to have both Offscreen Teleportation and Psychic Powers to know where they went, and the last we see of him, he's fallen and hit his head with a pool of blood forming, which makes it pretty obvious that the original intent was to just have him die then and there.
• In Cut, a group of students are being killed off while working on an unfinished slasher film rumored to be cursed. In the end, it turns out the killer is the one from the film itself. He's come to life through very poorly explained means involving "the creative energies put into the film" or some nonsense like that.
• In Dark Shadows, it is revealed that the daughter in the family is actually a werewolf. This might have been all fine and good except for the fact that there is absolutely no way to predict this happening, the movie ends 10 minutes later, and the reveal has ABSOLUTELY no effect on the movie. The cause of the reveal is explained away in half a line and questioned by no one. "Yes, I'm a werewolf. Let's not make a big deal about it" almost comes across as a taunt towards the audience, challenging them to try understanding what just happened. Well, at least some people think it's funny. In all fairness, the show the movie's based on does pull stunts like this from time to time, but how well the movie does (or doesn't) pull it off is debatable.
• Dead Silence: You know, it would have been nice to state that also human dolls are to be considered. Or that they exist at all.
• Throughout Dragonball Evolution we learn that Goku is not of this Earth, but The Reveal that Goku is Ozaru comes directly out of nowhere. After Piccolo's reign ended, how can Goku still be alive and who sent him into space only to send him back to Earth? And even then, there is no explanation for why Piccolo went to such lengths to have him killed if he was so critical to his plans.
• Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves has a rare justified example. The Hither Thither staff conveniently shows up to help the main characters overcome an obstacle. But since it's a Dungeons & Dragons movie, it comes off as exactly the kind of Ass Pull that a Dungeon Master would pull if their players were completely failing to solve a critical puzzle, and didn't want their party to fail the campaign in such a stupid and humiliating manner. For bonus points, the artifact they were searching for is used exactly once and does nothing, while the Hither Thither staff becomes the most important part of their arsenal for the rest of the movie—which is also a very D&D thing to do.
• eXistenZ uses this trope in-universe. In the climax, the male protagonist is suddenly revealed as another secret agent who was sent to kill his female partner all along, even though this contradicts most of what's been shown of the character. It's soon revealed to be part of another layer of the VR game, and the programmed plot twists (extracted from the players' minds) were becoming increasingly random.
• Flightplan (2005) has a twist that seems clever at first reveal, but progressively makes less and less sense as it goes on. The film's plot is that an aeronautics engineer named Kyle and her daughter Julia head from Berlin to New York for the father David's funeral after he dies in an accident, and the daughter goes missing on the plane... and there's no evidence she was ever on board. At the film's ending, it's revealed everything was masterminded by the air marshal, working with one of the flight attendants. David was murdered, the marshal bribed the mortuary director to let him plant explosives in the casket, the flight attendant abducted Julia and erased all record of her being on board. The plot was to use the explosives to extort $50 million from the airline, and pin it all on Julia. This works until you consider a lot of mental gymnastics need to be exercised for this to work, especially since it would have all been derailed if a single person on board had remembered seeing the girl.
• God Told Me To sets itself up as a supernatural thriller, then becomes a sci-fi movie as the outer space origin of the movie's killer is revealed. Then the movie becomes an Ass Pull pileup as we find out the hero is related to the Evil Space Jesus villain and has the same alien powers he possesses. Oh, Evil Space Jesus is a hermaphrodite. Who wants to mate with the hero. His own brother. Via a chest vagina. It's a weird, weird movie...
• Halloween:
  • John Carpenter himself admits that while writing Halloween II (1981), the idea of Laurie being Michael Myers' sister came to him "at 2:00 in the morning in front of a typewriter with a six pack of beer."
  • Also, the Man In Black from Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers. Word of God claims that they didn't even know who he should be before the sixth film was made.
  • The ridiculous Retcon in Halloween: Resurrection used to justify bringing Michael back. At the end of Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, Laurie decapitated Michael. Resurrection then retcons this to have it be that Michael switched clothes with the ambulance driver and crushed his throat so he couldn't talk, and that's who she killed. Yes, really.
• Happy Birthday to Me has one of the most ridiculous endings of any slasher movie. At first, it's "revealed" that Virginia, the protagonist, was the killer all along, before, out of nowhere, her mask is pulled off, and it's revealed that Ann was the one doing the killings disguised as Virginia. Ann also reveals that she's Virginia's long lost half-sister. It only resulted in making the movie more confusing and convoluted than it already was. Indeed, Virginia was actually the killer in the original script, but the director thought it was too obvious, so he came up with the resulting ending on the spot.
• In High Crimes, attorneys Claire Kubik and Charlie Grimes spend the entire movie trying to clear Claire's soldier husband Tom of war crimes charges. Only to find at the very end after they succeed in clearing Tom... Yeah, he did it. And then some. And then he tries to kill Claire because she knows about it. But she only knows - and not just suspects - because he tells her so.
• In Highlander: The Source, Duncan suddenly acquires super speed to be in equal match against the Guardian. They never said he could do it or how he was trained to do it, he just does.
• The killer in High Tension turns out to be Marie's evil split personality, manifested as a filthy trucker. Watch the film with this information in mind and realize how little sense it really makes.
• The sudden appearance of Frankenstein's Monster and Count Dracula (with his wife) near the end of House of the Wolf Man come off as this. The Monster's presence isn't that much of a stretch, as a member of the Frankenstein family is the owner of eponymous house, but Dracula? With no foreshadowing whatsoever, he appears in the doorway and is invited in.
• House Shark: When Frank's house starts flooding from Zachary blowing up his water heater and clogging the drain in the basement, where exactly did Frank get the life jacket he gave to Abraham from?
• In The Woods, a truly crazy DTV-horror film. The plot for most of the movie has to do with the discovery of an ancient skull reviving a demon who commits murders that the discoverer gets blamed for. The latter half of the film turns wildly incoherent as plot turns start getting introduced out of nowhere; including a second monster to whom the first is a dog, and a historical setup that depicts ninja swordfights between northern Michigan Native Americans.
• Joy Ride:
  • The two endings that did't make the final cut of the thriller both have Rusty Nail being killed, but the ending that made it to theaters has him get shot numerous times by police, only to make yet another threatening CB call to the heroes just as the movie ends. Horrors, he's Not Quite Dead! He just posed a victim in his truck to get shot in his place! It would have made for a nice twist except for the fact that he had a hostage in his passenger compartment who was A: very much alive, and B: very much not wearing a blindfold. She had to have seen the entire ruse being set up, but she not only doesn't tell the police about it, she's just as surprised as the rest of the group when Rusty calls again. Hell, with a shocking twist like that, who needs logic?
  • The direct-to-video sequel Joy Ride 3: Roadkill does it again, with Rusty Nail's truck going over a cliff with no way he could have jumped to safety. Cue the "surprise" epilogue where he's back in a new truck, picking up victims again.
• Subverted in Kill Bill when the Bride is buried alive. She is helpless, stuck in a coffin, and buried under several feet of dirt. She also has no allies. How is the protagonist going to get out of this one? Well, she just so happens to know a martial art punch to apply concentrated force with little momentum. The subversion is that instead of being a throw-away line used as a quick and cheap excuse to explain how she knew this technique, the movie spends a good portion of time explaining how she came to know this technique, which also comes into play later when she finally "kills Bill". It's basically an inverted Chekhov's Skill.
• Lifeforce (1985) wanted to have a Tomato in the Mirror ending by having one of the protagonists revealed as a space vampire. It would have worked, too, if this didn't contradict the rest of the movie.
• Live Free or Die Hard (aka Die Hard 4.0) appears to do one, when at one point the only method of transport available to John McClane is a helicopter. While starting the chopper up, McClane, a New York cop who barely ever does anything extracurricular except drink, reveals he 'took some lessons' once and flies himself and his companion away. It wasn't even a Chekhov's Skill mentioned before this point. It turns out that this scene existed to patch up a previous inconsistency: In Die Hard 2, McClane was afraid of flying, but didn't have any issue riding a helicopter in Die Hard with a Vengeance. McClane having taken some flying lessons was a way to make the two previous films consistent.
• Parodied in The Man with Two Brains. The oft-mentioned Elevator Killer turns out to be none other than Merv Griffin. The only foreshadowing leading to this is a scene where a character watches his talk show on TV.
• Mark of the Vampire: The dead man was killed by a person who deliberately faked a vampire attack. The "vampires" were actors hired to trap that murderer. All the main characters (other than the killer) were in on the trap. This doesn't make any sense, as the actors often act like vampires even when the murderer isn't around to be impressed, and in one scene a vampire attacks an innocent man for absolutely no reason.
• At the end of the 2007 film The Mist, convinced that they are doomed to a gruesome death, the protagonist kills the other 4 members of his party (including his own child) with the last 4 bullets he has. About a minute later the army shows up, along with thousands of survivors they have rescued. Some critics praised the director for making this bold nihilistic statement. Others thought it was a ridiculous and contrived ending which hurt the rest of the film. Stephen King, the writer of the original novella, has gone on record saying he approved it and even preferred it over his ending. Alternatively, the group fled as Mrs. Carmody wanted to sacrifice the child so God would take the mist away, so maybe she was correct.
• Monster a-Go Go, featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000, is probably the worst offender out there. It features a man who is turned into a radioactive giant. In the end, everyone prepares to pursue the monster into a dark tunnel when all of a sudden, the monster abruptly vanishes, and it's revealed shortly afterward that the man whom everyone thought was the monster was found "alive, well, and of normal size" many miles away, meaning all of the trouble everyone went through was over a monster that was never even there in the first place. This twist makes the entire movie a confusing, nonsensical mess.
• Morbius had post-credits scenes that were widely criticized, and not because it was bait with a well-known character that the trailers decide to spoil. The Vulture from Spider-Man: Homecoming suddenly arrives in Morbius' world, which even if Spider-Man: No Way Home showed Vulture's world being invaded by other Spider-Man adaptations and those outsiders managing to be sent back to where they came from, the process (involving a magic spell that affects those who know Spider-Man) also making Adrian Toomes leave his world made no sense. It's even worse when Vulture goes after Morbius: not only he managed to rebuild his flying suit despite not having the resources to do so, but goes on saying he assumes, with zero evidence, that Spider-Man is responsible for what happened to him, and manages to recruit Morbius, whom he does not know and who has never heard of Spider-Man as it's heavily hinted that the web crawler does not exist in this universe, for his cause.
• In the 2005 Spanish horror film The Nun, it turns out there isn't a killer ghost nun, it was the main character's Split Personality all along. Under scrutiny, this makes even less sense than Haute Tension's similar twist.
• The Other Guys invokes and perhaps even inverts this trope for laughs. Much of the first act is spent hitting you with every cheap, over-the-top action movie twist in existence until you actually expect something crazy and impossible to happen when Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson jump off a building... but it doesn't. They just fall, hit the concrete, and die instantly, and the movie keeps going without them.
• Out of Darkness: The reveal that the "monster" is actually just two neanderthals in costumes borders on nonsensical, as it renders all the extremely strange things the Presence did (moving incredibly fast, being impossibly strong, making monstrous noises unlike anything on Earth, ripping a mammoth to shreds in a way no hominid could, leaving behind some kind of tar-like black slime, etc.) utterly inexplicable. Likewise, the film's attempt to portray them as having been Good All Along and extremely reverent of life doesn't even remotely match their behavior throughout the movie, which was violently territorial at best, hyper-aggressive and malicious at worst.
• Paul Blart: Mall Cop: At the end of the movie, it turns out that Kent, the SWAT commander, was the mastermind behind the scheme with the robbery at the mall, with the previous apparent Big Bad being his partner Veck Sims. This was after he seemed to have been doing nothing but help Paul rescue the hostages in the mall with little indication that he was the one behind it, making his double-crossing of Blart come right out of nowhere.
• The ending of Perfect Stranger has the one character who could not possibly be the killer (Rowena Price) be the killer. This is why you don't let test audiences pick the ending.
• The end of Pieces has the mix and match corpse, that the killer made out of body parts from his victims, randomly come to life and rip a guy's balls off.
• Raising the Wind: Miranda winning the Strauss Scholarship. Out of the five flatmates, she was the one with the least importance or screentime, so her winning over someone like Malcolm or Mervyn feels undeserved.
• Remember Me is only ever remembered for its twist ending, in which the main character dies in the Twin Towers on 9/11. This twist still divides viewers to this day, with some seeing it as jarring and awkwardly forced into a movie that didn't warrant it to begin with, while others defend it for capturing the sudden shock of an event like that, helping younger viewers see just how traumatic it was for the people who lived it.
• In Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare, a rock band moves to a farmhouse and its members are killed one by one by the devil (yes, the devil). In the climax, the devil confronts John Triton, the sole remaining character, and starts gloating about killing his friends. Triton then reveals that he has killed no-one: his entourage were actually shadow puppets all this time, and Triton himself is an archangel who has come to banish the devil back to Hell.
• Parodied at the end of the first Scary Movie, where the killer is revealed to be the handicapped Doofy, who has already gotten away and is shown taking off his disguise, and is then picked up by his girlfriend and drives off into the sunset. Earlier in the film, the girlfriend had no idea that he was even the mastermind, but they're revealed to have been working together in the ending.
• Shut In:
  • The reveal that Stephen is not really paralyzed, as that would mean he was somehow able to fake catatonia for several months without being found out at all by his doctors.
  • Also, the reveal that he had been drugging Mary the whole time, which caused her odd dreams, as he was able to somehow move around the house and drug her without being noticed at all by her.
• Many villains in the Spy Kids films start off posing as good guys, but one particular backstab in the second, that of Felix Gumm, comes out of pretty much nowhere and adds pretty much nothing to the plot; the role he plays post-heel turn could fairly easily have been filled by an ordinary Mook. And in the third film, he's back to the good side with just as little explanation.
• The Stepford Wives (2004) remake tries for a Twist Ending, but just ends up contradicting itself on whether the wives are robots or Mind Controlled humans. In the movie's partial defense, this was a problem in the book as well.
• In Street Kings, in his darkest hour, Keanu pulls a handcuff key from his ass. OK, it was hidden in a special pocket under a seam in his jeans, but considering that it was never even alluded to earlier, the trope applies.
• The Superman movies angered comic book fans with some ass-pulled powers, particularly the ability to turn back time by making the Earth rotate backwards as the Deus ex Machina ending of Superman: The Movie, and the universally reviled "cellophane S" and memory-wipe kiss from the theatrical Superman II.
  • The memory-wipe kiss did appear in the comics first, although it was just as much an ass pull there, too. Heck, the Silver Age Superman comics were the undisputed champion of ass pull superpowers, come to think of it.
  • Some view the reverse-rotating Earth as a botched visual effect — meant to indicate that Superman isn't altering the Earth but instead traveling through time and (from his perspective) the Earth is rotating in reverse.
  • Superman IV: The Quest for Peace has the infamous "Rebuild-the-Great-Wall-of-China Vision". Superman could have done with his existing powers, but the effect was deemed too expensive.
• The Witches (1990) ends with the Grand Witch's assistant coming out of nowhere, reversing the effect of the potion that turned the protagonist into a mouse, and apparently becoming a human thanks to this good deed. Roald Dahl famously hated this ending and was furious that they didn't use a filmed ending that was more in line with the one in the book (the protagonist lives the rest of his life as a mouse). It is considered an ass pull since nowhere in the film or book it is ever said that there are good witches, that they can turn human or that the effects of their evil magic can be reversed. This ending is not in Robert Zemeckis' 2020 film adaptation, which does have an ending that is more in line with the one in the book even though it is not Truer to the Text.
• The Wizard of Gore is in love with this trope. Montag's murder method seems to be mass hypnosis, but the film points out repeatedly that there are several events that contradict that. Combine that with an ending where not only do we have a scene where the two main characters lampshade how unlikely the events were before one shows themselves to be the killer in disguise, but then the other person in the conversation reveals that it was her manipulations the entire time, fooling the villain. And then the villain wakes up and realizes it was All Just a Dream.

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