When their boss is murdered and their headquarters’ self-destruct program is initiated, eleven members of a shadowy government organization spend what little time they have left alternately looking for an escape route and slaughtering one another.

CRITIQUE

Operation: Endgame (don’t worry if you’ve never heard of it; no one else has either) is an awful movie. It’s supposed to be a blackly comic satire on workplace politics and the role the United States plays in international chicanery  (particularly in the first eight years of this decade), but it’s not funny or satirical. It’s really nothing more than a stupid, pointless mess, wasting both the combined talents of a pretty impressive cast and the time of anyone who makes the mistake of watching it.

This movie represents the first endeavors for its director and writers. Sam Levinson is credited with the screenplay, which was based on an original screenplay by Brian Watanabe. That’s the sort of credit I always find puzzling; I also find it troubling, seeing as how it’s similar to the way the writing credits for Caligula read, and look how that turned out. The director, Fouad Mikati, deserves credit for wrangling (read: tricking) this group of actors into signing up for his little home-movie-that-somehow-got-a-distribution-deal project, but that’s the only thing for which he deserves credit.

The movie he ended up making is boring, slow, pointless (repeated for emphasis), and crude. Levinson’s script has an awful structure (it grinds to a halt every five minutes in order to allow a selected character to run through a bunch of clunky exposition that explains something the person at whom the exposition is directed should already know), contains some of the most lamely profane dialogue you’re ever likely to hear (it sounds like the work of an eight-year-old who knows what a bad word is but doesn’t know how to put it into a proper context), is repetitive in the extreme, and features a couple of surprise twists that anyone who’s paying attention will have figured out long before the big reveal. And Mikati shoots like someone who, to borrow a phrase from a friend of mine, doesn’t understand that just because you can rent a movie doesn’t mean you can make one.

There’s fair amount of action (but despite the fact that seven members of the cast are shown wielding guns on the cover, there’s almost no gunplay), but it’s handled with zero style (the same goes for the violence and gore). The blocking and framing are often inept, and the scattershot editing doesn’t make things any better. The only entertainment value to be found in these scenes comes from watching the stunt doubles (whose appearance almost never matches that of the actors being doubled) frantically scramble to cover their faces.

It would be one thing if Mikati had talked one recognizable actor into taking a part here, but he managed to get roughly a dozen, which raises a number of questions, with the biggest being: Why? It’s become fashionable of late for actors on every rung of the Hollywood ladder to sign on for micro-budgeted indie flicks, but most of the time you can see, even if the end result isn’t exactly spectacular, what the draw was. Not here.

I can’t imagine why any of these people (not even Ving Rhames, who needs a fourth Mission: Impossible flick even more than Cruise does) thought this would be a good idea. You’ve got Rob Corddry, Ellen Barkin (who these days seems to be playing the same role over and over again), Jeffrey Tambor, and Bob Odenkirk, but why? You’ve got Emelie de Ravin (whose southern accent suggests Alabama by way of Queensland), Odette Yustman, and Maggie Q, but why?

What the hell did they see in this material? What potential did they see? And when they realized this potential wasn’t going to be met, did they all get together and collectively decide to turn in mediocre performances? There’s really not a decent performance among the bunch (but who can blame them?), nor is there any sort of tonal unity, with some people going way over the top and others dialing it down to the point of catatonia.

Getting back to what I said about renting movies as opposed to making them, Levinson and Mikati have apparently spent their lives renting the wrong ones. Had they chosen to see, say, Grosse Pointe Blank, Ninotchka, and The President’s Analyst, they may have formed a better idea of how to handle this material. But Operation: Endgame has nothing on any of those. Hell, it has nothing on Rocky, Bullwinkle, Boris, and Natasha.           

THE VIDEO

The 2.40:1/1080p transfer--encoded with AVC--is a little flat, a little murky, and boasts a level of detail that is middling at best. But it’s a no-budget indie, so this is more or less to be expected. Despite being shot on film (in an actual Panavision), the image has a slightly digital look, undoubtedly the result of the lighting choices (which often make the movie look as if it had been lit with only overhead fluorescents).  

THE AUDIO

Lossless audio is presented in the form of an uncompressed PCM 5.1 track. The mix here has the same indie vibe as the video, with a slightly hollow quality (especially noticeable during the action) that betrays the movie’s budget at practically every turn. Dialogue sounds okay; there’s some not-bad surround activity during some of the fights and in one scene that takes place in an echoing tunnel, but for the most part the mix leans on the front channels. A Dolby Digital 5.1 track (to which the disc defaults) is also included; English SDH and Spanish subtitles are available.

THE EXTRAS

The extras here are presented in standard definition.

Behind the Scenes of Operation: Endgame (10 minutes) is a free-form collection of videotaped moments from the shoot; some of the footage is contrasted with corresponding scenes from the completed movie.

The only other extras are an alternate opening and alternate ending (5 minutes total). The former adds a short scene to the beginning of the movie (which would have made one of the aforementioned twists that much more obvious), while the latter presents a shorter version of the final scene.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The idea of Odette Yustman and Maggie Q together in a movie about rival assassins had me expecting the catfight to end all catfights, but this never came to be. Not that it would have made Operation: Endgame worth watching, mind you. I don’t anything could have pulled off that monumental feat.