The Best Movie Threequels

Entertainment / Movies

The Best Movie Threequels

By: James Smith

At midnight on Friday, The Dark Knight Rises turns the summer box office into its personal playground. Given how hotly anticipated Chris Nolan’s conclusion to his Bat-saga has been, we got to thinking about the difficult task of concluding movie trilogies. As it turns out, not many have done it well. Here, our list of some of the best trilogy conclusions in the movies:

Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade -- We still think of the Indy movies as a trilogy in spirit, even if in fact George Lucas and Steven Spielberg decided to serve up a fourth installment -- one far removed from the original movie -- back in 2008. As fantastic as Raiders of the Lost Ark may be, it was The Last Crusade, coming on the heels on the weird darkness and bad acting in Temple of Doom, that solidified Indiana Jones as a cultural icon. Crusade is really the best of the three movies, with a significant father-son story to go along with the usual Indiana escapades...and Sean Connery.


Star Wars -- We’re double-counting this one because there are two Star Wars trilogies, both with their own unique cases regarding the final movie. In the original trilogy, The Return of the Jedi isn’t as good as the two movies that precede it, but it benefits by association -- and, to be fair, it’s asking a lot of any filmmaker to follow up Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. Revenge of the Sith is probably about as good, but it was asked to follow up two far inferior films. Regardless, at least we know that George Lucas can finish a trilogy.

 
The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King -- A lot of people love The Two Towers, but the fact is that it’s narratively the weakest of the Lord of the Rings movies. The Return of the King has its own faults -- a lot of cheesy dialogue, Orlando Bloom, and no less than five moments in a row that seem like they’re the ending -- and it never quite reaches the heights of The Fellowship of the Ring. Still, it’s a rousing, satisfying conclusion to one of the biggest cinematic achievements of the last two decades, and the first threequel to ever win Best Picture.  Just watch the trailer below and you'll see why. 

 
The Bourne Ultimatum -- Like Return of the King, Ultimatum represented a terrific bounce-back from a good-not-great second installment. The Bourne Identity fully established Matt Damon as one of the top names in Hollywood and transformed the way action movies are made. Supremacy, its follow-up, delivered great action but was mostly incomprehensible when it came to the plot. Ultimatum sewed up the trilogy (at least, the Matt Damon portion of it) by bringing it all full circle and letting Bourne finally choose his own path -- while working as a damn good thriller as well.
 
The Dollars Trilogy -- The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is unquestionably the most famous in Sergio Leone’s epic Spaghetti Western saga starring Clint Eastwood as the Man With No Name, the world’s greatest gunslinger. Where the first two movies in Leone’s trilogy, A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More, are solid, violent Westerns, the final installment is closer to an epic, and is probably the greatest Western ever made (take that, John Wayne!).  It's also the only prequel on the list - though that's arguable.  If you like gunfights, big vistas of the West, or Clint Eastwood, this is the threequel for you. 


Shark Attacks -- No one’s saying that any of these are good movies, but there may not be any movie as epically, tragically atrocious as Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, in which a gigantic shark terrorizes a Mexican resort town apparently populated by Romanian immigrants and heroic Tom Cruise lookalike lifeguards. Featuring bad CGI, cardboard characters, a ludicrous plot, and the greatest awful line in the history of cinema (fair warning: it's NSFW), Megalodon takes the pioneering awfulness of its two predecessors and elevates it to the level of some kind of masterpiece of hack.

 
[Pic via Flickr - CLF]
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