Am I the only one who was bothered by this not-so-obvious fact?!

Yeah,It's a Holly wood movie. That plot happens in movies all the time. The hero is accused of something bad and commits a hundred worse crimes to clear his name and blam Happy Ending!(nothing bad happens to the hero because he cleared his name, the other crimes just get erased!!...lol)

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First off, we don't know what will happen to him because the movie ends with Danny Roman on the way to hospital.

Secondly, the "mood" isn't that much "justice prevailed, PERIOD". The mood is more like "WTF!?". I mean, instead of a single guy (Danny) 5 guys including Niebaum and their captain turn out to be involved. That's hard to digest. I mean, they all stood there when the captain confessed his involvement, that was a chin-dropping moment, an eye-opener. It's just natural that nobody is thinking about possible punishment or arrestment of Danny at that moment.

Next, Danny wasn't really responsible for all the damage caused and Niebaum killed. Yes, he took hostages at put them at risk with that, but virtually every damage cause and blood spilled was due to the corrupt cops and them playing against the rules and disobeying orders. If they would have handled the situation like professionals, nobody would have been hurt and almost nothing would have been damaged.

Finally, yes, even taling everything into consideration, Danny would still be accused for taking hostages. BUT it's very unlikely that the police and the city or whoever the prosecutor will be, it's unlikely that they really try hard to put Danny into prison. For everybody involved it would be the best to give him some symbolic punishment and slap on the wrist. Why? Because he helped to catch 4 corrupt cops in an incident that makes the police department look very, very bad. If they pushed the limits to punish Roman, they would look even worse, as if there were more corruption going on. They obviously can't make him an hero because it would be wrong to encourage selfjustice but they definately also don't want to make him an martyr. They would most likely make an agreement behind the scenes with Roman, something Roman can live with and that is enough of punishment for the open public.
The only thing that would become problematic is if one of the hostages would charge Roman. But since they were on Roman's side by the end of the movie, I doubt they would.

Nothing is going to happen.
Because these were special circumstances.

I admit i thought the exact same.

Firstly though, at the end of the film, we do not know what will happen to our 'hero'' as we are not shown.

However, i see your point in the sense that i don't buy how holding hostages and casuing all this mayhem was a good decision. It seems to me as though you are trading a death sentence with the possibilty of much worse.

But TBH, i really enjoyed the film, it gave me what i wanted from a Hollywood movie. I watched the new Pelham 123 recently also, and it could have learnt a ton of lessons from this film, because despite the unbelieveability of it all, the story is well developed, we get a wide scope of all of the people involved and i actually didn't mind the acting either.

Top5 Films:Seven Samurai, Hidden Fortress,Treasure of Sierra Madre, Throne of Blood,Goodfellas

It's been awhile since I've seen this flick and decided to give it a go this weekend.

I thought about the ending too and it reminded of the conversation between Roman and Sabian about the ending of the western film 'Shane'. That conversation was signifant to the meeting with Frost towards the end but it can be seen how relevant it was to the ending shot of this film.

Did Shane die in the end? Does Roman die due to complications of his second gunshot? Does Shane come back? Does Roman not get reprimanded for things he's done to clear his name? Did the film makers really intend for this 'glass half full or glass half empty' query for us viewers?

I'm with some of the other posters; the ending is more ambiguous than you're giving it credit for. We don't know what's going to happen to Roman next. For all we know, they might be waiting til he gets out of emergency surgery before charging him with all the stuff you mentioned.

And I must add, some of you posters have some funny ideas on how the law works. In the eyes of the law, Danny absolutely does NOT get a pass on anything he did, even if he did uncover a ring of corrupt cops in the process. At best it would get him a reduced sentence. Contrary to what you see in a lot of movies, you're not allowed to break the law to stop someone else from committing a crime.


________________________
'It's a mess, ain't it, sheriff?'
'If it ain't, it'll do till the mess gets here.'

It's up to convincing a jury that you had to take hostages and shoot at cops, which turned out to be the bad guys anyway... the jury may believe that you had to do what it took to save your innocent life from being fried. Or the judge might let him off if his lawyer pleads on the grounds of necessity.

That's a law where you can plea to the court that you had no choice and had to commit a crime against the people against you to escape death. In this case, fight off cops and take hostages to escape the chair.