Operation: Endgame

I am gonna explain what i wanna write with a metaphor.

If any of you has ever cooked from a cookbook before you will be sure to come across a recipe wherein you'll say to yourself 'that amount of salt can't be good' OR 'this much paprika...what do you wanna do? gimme an ulcer?!' OR 'that kinda butter is gonna give me a potbelly!'. So you adjust the ingredients, maybe even add a few of your own thinking you are gonna make the recipe your own, and then you find out the dish turned out bland and could have done without your own twists. It needed only those ingredients and in the quantity mentioned in the recipe to make it work.

I guess you get my point. When i came across the trailer it seemed to be a satirical action comedy with lots of gore to boot. And given the cast, it screamed awesome mindless fun.

But i guess the director decided that he needed to 'adjust the ingredients', maybe to make it his own style rather than a formulaic one. Well, sir, sometimes the formula is all that is needed. The action lacked the punch. There was blood and gore, yes, but the scene would cut to those 2 guys in 'corporate' making puking faces just when you though you are gonna see something really gross. The dialog, or rather the delivery, was sporadic at best - too rehearsed - almost like a B-movie. The action was badly choreographed and the camera angle shifted too many times for it to be smooth and coherent.

The premise of the movie couldn't be faulted though. Neither could the setting. Assassins having office-like cubicles and killing each other with office equipment is a cool idea. If only it could have been executed better.

I did not expect there to be a plot, and so the plot-twist at the end that tried to give some serious patriotic theme to the movie just felt 'bleh'. In fact, it did not make any sense at all.

Oh, if only the director had just stuck to the formula of max action, max gore and max comedy, then the premise and the actors themselves would have make this one a hit! Too bad!!

Somewhere beneath Washington, D.C., an intense rivalry is heating up between two opposing teams of government assassins. The hired killers in the organizations take their names from Tarot cards. The Fool (Joe Anderson) is the latest recruit. Reporting for his first day on the job, The Fool is shocked to find that his boss is dead, and the office is on lockdown. To make matters worse, the building has been rigged with explosives, and it's going to blow soon. Now, in order to get out alive, The Fool will have to root out the killer in his midst, and make a quick escape before his co-workers catch him in their crosshairs.

Operation Endgame, a satirical workplace comedy with a slick action twist is not without it's flaws. The plot is convoluted, most of the dialog is incredibly silly and the whole thing isn't that funny. Having said that, the film is damn entertaining. The cast is composed, among others, by Zach Galifianakis, Emilie de Ravin, Maggie Q, Rob Corddry, Ellen Barkin,Bob Odenkirk, Ving Rhames. There's plenty of star power here but, while some of the actors were delightful, others were completely underused. Being a battle royale of sorts, the deaths kept piling up and therefor some brilliant actors like Bob Odenkirk (who has been phenomenal in the TV show Breaking Bad) had very little screen time.

In the end, it's all about what you're expecting. Operation Endgame is no Oscar contender. This is mindless fun with a bit of action and gore in the middle and the film clearly doesn't take itself too serious and in my opinion it succeeded in what it intended to do which is, to entertain.

6/10

I'll admit, with a cast like this I had expectations. Please be ready to have them dashed very quickly! This film didn't really live up to anything - it was almost like it tried too hard to fit too many different genres, and instead ended up with a bunch of nothingness.

Nothing seemed to fit together, there was no real plot or storyline, and I was bored. I usually watch right to the end of a film, even if I'm not really enjoying it, because there might be some redeeming feature or I might be a bit curious about how it all ends - but I didn't care about this one. At all.

It wasn't funny enough to be a comedy (I think I half-heartedly chuckled about twice) and there wasn't enough action or drama for it to be classed as anything else - I just really didn't see the point of it, and I'm very surprised at the number of well known actors who actually agreed to be in it! Very poor, and not worth wasting your time on.

Every now and then there comes a movie that makes me want to write a review on; just to do the world a favor and help people save their money and time.

Do not bother with this one. It's got a good cast which tricked me into watching it. But when you take a good cast and hand it over to a developmentally retarded director, you get a movie called 'Operation endgame' The director clearly didn't know what he wanted. It was a wannabe comedy mixed with a wannabe action flick, that has no humor, little action and a wee bit of gore. It was a mess. It was so bad, that i don't even want to finish this review.

so i'll make it very simple; acting - bad, character development - there WAS none! cohesiveness - wasn't there, action - OK i suppose, comedy - bad, script - bad, plot - wtf?! overall - 2/10; only because i'm a nice guy:)

I watched this movie purely for Emilie De Ravin as Hierophant, but let me tell you, I was pleasantly amused! I'm not a big fan of violent comedies, but if you view this as more or less an assassin parody, it's a million times better. What really makes it is the security men up watching them all kill each other and reacting the same way I did, complete with shouts of "GET HIM!" and gagging. The cast is fun, the script expectantly awful in all the right ways, but this is NOT a movie to take seriously. Watch it when you have nothing better to do and have a good laugh. The twists and turns are fun and the score is pretty easy listening as well.