"You think it's easy to look like a bearded tampon?"
What a weird, odd, and ultimately underwhelming mixture Operation: Endgame ended up being.
I was expecting a bloody action comedy with several really hot women and a couple of funny/interesting actors playing rival assassins who are out for blood, but instead I got a predictable, poorly scripted, ham-fisted critique on Bush-era intelligence operations. The great cast was really the only thing that made this movie somewhat worth my time. We've got Odette Yustman, Zach Galifiankis, Maggie Q, Rob Corddry, Adam Scott, Brandon T. Jackson, Emilie de Ravin, Ving Rhames, Jeffrey Tambor...it's like someone asked me personally about all the actors I'd like to see in a movie. Yet, they're utterly wasted on characters that are terribly written. It shouldn't be possible to make a mediocre movie with a cast this great, but whoever wrote the script certainly pulled it off.
The majority of the jokes are unfunny (Corddry does get a few gems, though), the fight choreography is unimpressive, and the movie as a whole would have been better without the looping real-life footage of President Obama's inauguration and the lame attempts to ground the story in some kind of political statement. I'm all for messages in movies, but Operation: Endgame goes about it without any subtlety or wit, and seemed a muddled mess as a result.
I'm giving this a high score than it deserves because I got some enjoyment just from the opportunity to see a few of the actors I'm quite fond of (good Lord, Odette Yustman looks fantastic in a tank top), but I feel pretty comfortable advising others to just skip it, entirely. It's a shame that a movie with such potential ended up stumbling in the execution.
