Classic Case of Doesn't Know How (or When) to End

Rating: 6/10 (22 August 2016)

"10 Cloverfield Lane" is 15 minutes of big-budget Hollywood sci-fi awkwardly tacked on to 90 minutes of claustrophobic psychological thriller. The end result is a film that kept me pretty engaged for the majority of its running time, only to end by leaving me pretty disappointed and feeling like I'd been duped into sitting through nothing but an excuse to make a sequel.
John Goodman gives a fantastic performance as a survivalist who may or may not be a lunatic and who's keeping a young woman (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) sort of held captive in his bunker for motives that may or may not be admirable. As you might have guessed, there's a whole lot of ambiguity at the center of the film. We don't know exactly what's happening or why; we don't know who can be trusted and who can't. And both the fun and the tension in the film come from seeing plot points tick into place, sometimes clarifying things for us, other times confusing us even more. But this is a movie that suffers from a severe case of "we don't know how to end this," and it goes off the rails in a bad way in its last 15 minutes. Goodman's character turns into a laughably hokey monster when up to that point in the movie he's been anything but, and a series of actions carried out by our heroine stretch our credibility past its breaking point. I didn't have a problem with the big reveal at the film's climax, but the movie should have ended with it instead of continuing on long past the point when the novelty of the film's twist wears off.
Not a total loss by any means, but definitely leaves the taste of misfire in the viewer's mouth.
Grade: B