The ending of this movie stinks. It is the equivalent of telling a child a very suspenseful tale of a prince and a dragon. You build up skillfully to a climactic battle, and as the prince is raising his sword, you say, "But the dragon suddenly had a brain aneurysm and died, leaving the prince looking like a fool who lived unhappily ever after. Hey... sh*t happens, you know?"<br /><br />Before the sneers and mutterings of "philistine" begin, let me say that I know what the screenwriters and the director were going for -- Greek tragedy: a good man, a Hero is brought to ruin by a fatal flaw in his character. The problem is that here, as in all storytelling, a tragic ending must also be a satisfying one for the audience. No matter how sad the hero's fall/demise, no matter what plot twists occur, one has to be able to say, "Well, that's tragic, but it had to happen. It was inevitable." It's a storytelling tightrope, from which the screenwriters and director fell from great heights, crashed and burned.<br /><br />In trying to throw a curve, they threw a spitball; they cheated. A deus ex machina ("Machine of the Gods") is a phony dramatic contrivance where the Gods step in at the end of a story and make everything right again. The hero is off the hook. What happened to the serial killer here was worse than a deus ex machina. He is killed by coincidence. That's just cheating.<br /><br />I would like to suggest what would have been a truly tragic ending. Make Jerry Black a lonelier man. One whose two failed marriages have left him without hope of having a family. Then he meets Lori and Chrissy. His unexpected love for them grows to *almost* the size of his obsession with catching the killer. Give him a true choice between love & obsession and let him pick the wrong one. Then let him catch the goddamned killer. And after he does, this Hero, having fulfilled his task, turns for love and adoration to Lori, who lets him have the same speech she does now and whisks herself and her daughter out of his life. Black then fully realizes what his heroic choice has cost him, and ends up lonely, embittered and perhaps mad.<br /><br />That would have been a satisfying ending, because the way things play now, here's what the audience is thinking, "He deserves to catch the killer. He does not deserve to have this family after endangering Chrissy so horribly."<br /><br />The ending of "The Pledge" is badly, terribly wrong, as it trashes what up until then was one of the finest suspense films I've ever seen and one of Jack Nicholson's greatest performances.