Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

In this movie ‘Operation Endgame’ everyone has names based off of tarot cards. We first meet the character who will be eventually called Fool (Joe Anderson) at an outdoor bistro meeting up with the character of High Priestess played by Maggie Q who I think might weigh about seventy five pounds. Soon she is joined by her colleague the drunken and profane Chariot, played by Rob Coddry who plays this same character so freaking often that I’m beginning to think he actually shows up on the set drunken and profane and this just makes things easier on everybody. Today is Fool’s first day on the job working for some super secret underground government agency, and it also happens to be the day that president Barack Obama is being inaugurated as the 44th president of this great nation of ours.

High Priestess and Chariot take Fool to the super secret underground facility where he meets his fellow secret agents. I’m not quite sure how this whole thing works out, even though I know it was explained to me, but you have your Alpha Team and your Omega Team and it all relates somehow to… I don’t know. Regardless, there are all kinds of agents here in this place, all played by actors that are relatively well known. Ving Rhames, Adam Scott, Odette Sussman who is tall and rail thin but we estimate she weighs about 20 pounds more than Maggie Q, Zach Galifianakis, Brandon T. Jackson, Bob Odenkirk, Emily D. Ravin at an estimated 92 pounds, Jeffrey Tambor and Ellen Barkin who is tall and a little top heavy so we think she might clock in at around 120. I believe I weigh more than the combined weight of the entire female cast of this movie. While this cast of actors might not be Will Smith and Julia Roberts, this is still a pretty heavy duty cast for what is essentially a Straight to DVD movie.

So right, these guys are all secret agents and assassins, even though I can’t remember their real purpose in the grand scheme of everything despite the fact I just finished watching this movie fifteen minutes ago. What I do know is that they all curse a lot and that somebody has killed their boss. Whoever this killer might be is still among them and this Killer, I think, has enabled Operation Endgame which will flood this locked down underground bunker with napalm in two hours if they don’t find an exit. While getting out of an underground facility bound for an explosion might seem like a priority to you and me, our assassin’s main priority is killing each other. Again, I’m really not sure why, though I’m sure it was all explained. I’m thinking it’s just that I didn’t care.

Back and forth they go, cursing each other and killing each other in all kinds of inventive ways, since they had to check their guns at the door, as the clock counts down to triple zero. Or hextuple zero since it’s counting down to like 00:00:00. But what’s going on? Who killed the bossman and why? Again, I believe all of this was explained but as suspected, I have long stopped caring.

In honor of ‘Operation Endgame’ we’re going to perform this next paragraph in Operation Endgame Speak. Shield your eyes. So, fuck… I’m fucking trying to figure what the fuck was going on this fucking movie because it wasn’t making no fucking sense really, having some shit to do with President Obama and Dick Cheney and shit, but fuck if I knew what the fuck was going on. The good thing is that the fucking cast seemed clued on this fucking movie even if the fucking audience wasn’t so that kind helped to move this fucking shit along. But fuck, this doesn’t fucking help me figure this shit the fuck out.

Damn, that was exhausting. I don’t know how these actors pulled this off for 80 minutes. And since the movie was so short there’s probably another half hour of incessant f-bombs on the cutting room floor somewhere. It’s almost as if director Fouad Mikati was watching his actors work, yelled ‘CUT’ and pulled each and everyone of them to the side and said "You need to say the word ‘fuck’ more. I thought we rehearsed this. Follow Coddry’s lead."

The sad truth of the matter is that there really isn’t much too ‘Operation Endgame’ outside of the cursing. The movie does look and sound fantastic and we can clearly see it has a stellar cast, but this cast is largely wasted on a truncated, scattershot narrative, some suspect action sequences, a story with so many gaping plot holes that I think this movie might actually need that vacant twenty minutes of edited out F-bombs.

I believe, and I could be mistaken since the incessant use of the word Fuck numbed me out to much of what was going on in this movie, but I believe the basis of this movie was some kind of political statement. Now if you take a step back and actually try to break down what occurred in this movie and try to apply it to what this political statement it may, or may not be saying… nothing really holds up since it doesn’t make any sense… particularly when it finally comes to it’s ‘twist’ ending, but I do believe that’s what it was going for.

How disappointing. A 77 minute movie with killing, slaughter, explosions, mayhem, Rob Coddry, Ving Rhames and Maggie Q shouldn’t feel like I just sat through watching the entire Lonesome Dove trilogy in one sitting. How does this happen?