That leaves it up to Rake to get Ovi across to his team leader Nik Khan (Golshifteh Farahani), but even as he gets the boy to safety, Rake is first badly wounded by the leader of the military and then given the seemingly fatal shot by a vengeful street youth (Suraj Rikame) who is loyal to Asif and was defeated by Rake in an earlier fight.
As Ovi and Khan watch in horror, a profusely bleeding Rake perches on the bridge railing and — seeing a vision of his little son dancing on a beach — plunges backwards hundreds of feet into the water, mirroring an introductory scene in which we saw a drunken Rake jump recklessly from a cliff into a waiting pool. This time, however, he does not surface.
Eight months later, two things happen: as Ovi swims in his school swimming pool, we cut to a restaurant where a disguised Nik Khan approaches Asif in the restroom and ruthlessly dispatches him with several bullets to the head. Meanwhile, Ovi surfaces from the pool and glances to his right — where a blurry figure who could be Tyler Rake watches him from the deck.
Is it Rake? Did he somehow survive and if so, has he come back to see the boy with whom he has now formed an emotional bond? Was his fate left deliberately ambiguous and could there be more missions in Tyler Rake’s future?
“We did end up going with the ambiguous ending,” says director Sam Hargrave. “We found in the testing of the movie, and back and forth between us as filmmakers, that there was kind of a split down the middle of those who wanted Tyler Rake to live and those who thought his story was completed with his sacrifice for Ovi. So we devised this idea of an ending that kind of serviced both camps.”
