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!!

Last night i watched this movie with high expectations hoping for a lot of gun fights after seeing the poster, but there are none. Don't get me wrong it doesn't mean that this is a bad movie. It was actually pretty funny and had some good fight scenes.

I really liked it and enjoyed it. It was fun.

I really do recommend this movie to people.

If your expecting a gun crazy action movie - Don't bother at all.

If your expecting a comedy/action thats not to be taken seriously at all - Go for it!

7/10

When I sat down to watch "Operation: Endgame" (aka "Rogues Gallery") I had no idea at all what the movie was about. The reason why I wanted to watch it was because of the people on the cast list.

I found out that this was an action comedy, although I will admit that the movie is more lenient towards the action as it towards comedy. The comedy is there, yes, but it is fairly subtle but straight to the point.

The story is about a group of government assassins who work in a secret underground compound. The assassins are known only by the names from the Tarot card deck. And when new assassin, The Fool, arrives for his first work day, the boss of the operation is killed and operation: endgame is initiated, giving the assassins only limited time to escape the compound. But some assassins have been given secret targets to kill, and with nowhere to run, whom can you trust? I will say that the storyline was entertaining, albeit a bit silly.

There is nothing in the movie to make you buy into it, and as such it does come off as a comedy on the action genre. The storyline is simplistic and easy to follow, requiring you to disable your brain and just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Although working with fairly two-dimensional characters, there was an impressive list of people to be found on the cast list here.

For a comedy, then "Operation: Endgame" didn't really deliver that much impact, and if you enjoy these type of covert government operation comedies, then there are some better choices available. But still, "Operation: Endgame" is worth a watch for about 87 minutes worth of entertainment that doesn't require you to bring along your brain.

"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.

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.