Operation: Endgame is about an office filled with 2 teams of spies, Alpha & Omega, known as The Factory.  It’s a typical office, just top secret.  On Fool’s (Joe Anderson; Across The Universe) first day the boss (Jeffrey Tambor; Arrested Development) is murdered and Operation Endgame is started which leaves the agents with 2 hours till the entire office explodes and no escape.  It’s then that they start battling each other.  Oh and it doesn’t help that Fool’s ex-girlfriend (Odette Yustman; The Unborn) is a spy on the other team.  The movie can best be described as a sort of Office Space on crack.  It’s directed by Fouad Mikati from a script by Sam Levinson based on a script by Brian Wantanabe.

This is a very odd movie.  It is almost a study in opposites.  You have 2 different genres battling each other in an awkward way along with an obviously microscopic budget in contrast to a full cast of “name” stars.  Let’s start with that cast.

They went and cast a whole bunch of brilliant comedic actors.  Rob Corddry and his one liners pretty much steal the film.  Then you have Ving Rhames,  Adam Scott, Bob Odenkirk, Jeffrey Tambor, and Zach Galifianakis (who despite being featured prominently on the poster is only in the film briefly).  All of them killer actors and excellent with comedy.  It’s kinda insane how good these guys are.  Then they rounded out the cast with some other great actors like Emilie de Ravin and Ellen Barkin who also do killer jobs here.  Brandon T. Jackson (Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief) is also great.  Even Odette Yustman who’d I’d only seen in the horrible “horror” movie The Unborn is great here.  Unfortunately with all this talent the lead is where they went wrong.  Joe Anderson’s performance is really lacking.

So you’ve got this great cast what now?  Well it seems like a lot of the time, especially in early scenes, they just let them improvise and come up with some great one liners.  This is where Corddry really steals the show.  Early on the movie is a lot more of a comedy but then it just starts being a sequence of “action” scenes that aren’t really action scenes but kinda shitty fights using improvised weapons that you would find around an office (like a paper cutter or leg of a table).  A few of these manage to be funny, but a lot of them fall flat.  As the movie approaches the climax they try to throw this conspiracy in and really lose the comedy entirely and the whole movie is just left with a very weird tone to it.

There’s a good amount of blood but this movie’s low budget shows (clearly they used any money they had on the cast) and the effects department is a pretty big failure.  There’s also a weird thing that this takes place on Obama’s inauguration (during the inauguration actually) and they keep cutting to clips of his speech but it’s distracting and also it’s all out of order.  Like you’ll see him post speech then in the middle of it.  It’s just odd and they could have done without that bit.

Anyway I found this pretty enjoyable for what it was and though it is deeply flawed it’s also pretty fun.  It’s worth at least a rental.

It’s available on Amazon on DVD and Blu-Ray:

And it’s also available to rent or buy on Amazon Video On Demandand