Operation: Endgame

When I saw the cast for Operation: Endgame, I wondered how I could have not heard a peep about this movie.  Seriously, it has Rob Corddry, Ellen Barkin, Zach Galifianakis, Ving Rhames, Maggie Q, Adam Scott, Joe Anderson (from last year's awesome The Crazies), Odette Yustman (from the awful The Unborn), Brandon T. Jackson (from Tropic Thunder), Emilie de Ravin (from...um...Maxim magazine, maybe?), Tim Bagley, Michael Hitchcock, Bob Odenkirk, and Jeffrey Tambor.  Admittedly, the cast isn't exactly full of Oscar winners, but I recognized every single billed actor.  Somehow, the familiarity of the stars didn't gather enough interest to get this theatrically released, so straight-to-DVD it went.

The premise here is pretty simple ridiculously convoluted.  There is a government agency that is in charge of super-secret black ops, but the agency was so dangerous (um...JFK, anybody?) that they needed to be kept in check.  However, they also needed to remain clandestine and shadowy.  So, the agency was split into two forces, Alpha and Omega, and they spend most of their time out-super-spying the other team, essentially canceling each other out.  Every member of Alpha and Omega is a deadly assassin, but each has their own particular skill set.  Each member also hands over any weapons as they enter the office every day and they are only referred to by their Tarot card-related code-names.  And yes, these super-secret assassins all work out of the same cubicle-filled office.  The movie begins with Fool (Joe Anderson) coming in for his first day of work, and we experience all the weirdness with him.  It's not all fun and murder, though; the boss for the two teams, The Devil (Jeffrey Tambor), gets himself killed and a fail-safe self-destruction program is set off.  Alpha and Omega have about an hour and twenty minutes (or, the run time for the movie) to either escape the escape-proof office, or disable the bomb.  You would think that would lead to cooperation between the two groups, but instead, it leads to lots and lots of killing with non-traditional weapons.

Improbably sharp paper cutter, meet shockingly dead-eyed actress.

I'm not going to focus much on the acting in this movie, because there isn't really a whole lot of it.  The dialogue is surprisingly funny for a direct-to-DVD release, but other than that, everybody is in this movie until they get killed.  I am surprised that I actually enjoyed Rob Corddry in this movie; it's pretty much the same bit he always does, but a little less desperate and more vulgar this time.  Ellen Barkin was also surprisingly funny and shockingly good looking for a woman her age.  There were no other surprises in the mix, as far as the actors go.

The dialogue is the star of this movie.  Every character is impressively witty and most are creative with their cussing and sexual references.  Corddry and Barkin clearly had a great time saying so many awful things, but they had the lion's share of the good lines.  Many of the actors spoke three or four lines total before getting killed, so it was hard to actually like any of the characters.  That's kind of the point, though; these people are so evil that they supposedly have to kill a puppy to join the agency.  Even the less evil characters, like the guys observing all the action on closed-circuit video feeds (Tim Bagley and Michael Hitchcock), are hard to like; in their case, it's because they're just there as reactionary characters that say "Ooh, gross!" when someone gets killed.  Since every character is a deadly assassin, there are no innocents in this movie.  Since there are no innocents in the movie, it's a lot harder to pinpoint who to like.  In the end, you end up rooting for whoever you think is the funniest, and then they probably get killed.

There is a huge body count in this movie.  It's not just the less famous actors who die, either.  Every character is willing and able to kill any other character, so you might find yourself surprised at who dies when.  Unfortunately, you probably won't be surprised by the ones who die last.  This is a movie that wants to feel unpredictable, but once the movie is halfway through, you should have a pretty good idea on how it's going to end.  That's not necessarily a bad thing (in broad strokes, anyway), but it is if the movie is putting a lot of effort into being clever.

The movie's not bad, but it's nowhere near as awesome as its script thinks it is.  I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the first half of the movie, but it started getting formulaic and was pretty dull toward the end.  This movie worked a lot better with (most of) the characters alive than it did with them dead.  I like dick jokes as much as the next guy, but many of the characters used distinctly different types of sarcasm; the main ones left standing toward the end were basically telling the same jokes coming from different mouths.

Yeah, that's how I felt when the movie ended, too.

This was director Fuoad Mikati's first movie, and it's not a ad first effort.  He lets the actors do their thing --- I'm guessing that he didn't handle them much, since they all act about as well as ever --- and he keeps the pace moving.  Personally, I would have significantly cut down on Bagley and Hitchcock's screen time, but the movie wasn't even an hour and a half long, so it's not like they broke up the flow of the movie.  they were just annoying.  The special effects indicate that this was a pretty low-budget for what is essentially a funny action movie, so I think Mikati did a decent job with what he had to work with.

Having said that, I ended up not enjoying this movie.  It had potential and there were a decent amount of funny one-liners, but that's about all it had.  It misused most of the cast, killing several characters off early for shock value and not getting anything more than that.  The story throws a couple of twists in, but the plot is so convoluted and stupid that you never care why things are happening, as long as Corddry gets to insult Barkin's vagina again.  He does.  And she gives a rebuttal.  But that's only kind of funny.  The action takes up a lot of the film, but it's not all that amazing, probably because it is performed mainly by comedians.  Ugh, and Bagley and Hitchcock end up spending waaaaay too much time commenting on the fights they are watching; in an action movie, do you want to react to an awesome kill, or do you want some other, Rob Schneider-like character do it for you?  I would have called this a perfectly mediocre movie, but I really hated those two guys.

Piranha (2010)

Most movies want to convince you that they are high quality pieces of work, worth your time and your money.  Not every movie has the same strengths, of course, but action movies, comedies, dramas, horror or whatever, they all want to be thought of as "good."  However, not every movie is going to be good, and filmmakers know that.  Every year, there are hundreds of B-movies made for nickels on the Hollywood dollar, some of which turn out to be surprise hits, but most are just crappy direct-to-DVD fodder.  Once in a while, though, an odd beast rears its head: the big budget B-movie.  Piranha (2010), or Piranha 3D, is one of these strange creations, following in the proud footsteps of Snakes On a Plane.  It has no pretension of being anything but a cheesy movie with ample nudity and gore, no apologies needed or asked for.  Oh, and you can take your "piranhas are native to South American rivers, not Arizona" and shove it, along with your "research has proved that piranhas are more nuisances than dangers."  Take that, science!  Here's a fun fact: this film was made for $24 million, which is more than it cost to make four of this year's Best Picture nominees, and twice what it took to make the Best Picture winner, The King's Speech.  Don't get angry, it will just give you nosebleeds.

It is Spring Break and the tourist town of Lake Victoria is overflowing with drunken co-eds.  The local sheriff, Julie Forrester (Elizabeth Shue), and her deputy, Fallon (Ving Rhames), are trying their best to keep the annual chaos to a manageable minimum.  Since this is such a busy week for Julie, she forces her college-age son, Jake (Steven R. McQueen, grandson of Steve McQueen), to baby-sit his younger brother and sister instead of partying.  That's too bad, too, because the girl he totally has the hots for, Kelly (Jessica Szohr), is back in town and is hanging out with a bunch of jerkwads.  Life is tough sometimes.  Jake stumbles into some luck, though; he casually meets Derrick (Jerry O'Connell), the man behind the Girls Gone Wild Wild Wild Girls video series, and Derrick needs a local to help him find all the right spots to shoot his softcore pornography.  Shrugging off his family duties, Jake joins up with Derrick, some hot Wild Wild Girls starlets, and Kelly (more on her later) as they cruise their yacht to somewhere a little more comfortable.  Little do they know that a earthquake the afternoon before opened a chasm at the bottom of Lake Victoria, connecting it to a previously unknown subterranean lake.  And that lake is populated exclusively by thousands of piranhas.  These aren't regular piranhas, though; these are a proto-piranha species, thought to have been extinct for over two million years.  Piranhas, meet Spring Break.  Spring Break, meet your gory doom.

A quick side note on Kelly's character.  She first shows up in the movie with a douchey boyfriend in tow, who (of course) picks on Jake for no reason.  She then runs into Jake as he is about to board the slut boat party yacht, and when Derrick sees Jake talking to her, he invites her to join them.  Derrick is obviously a sleazebag, and she has just commented on how lame the Wild Wild Girls thing is, so Jake tries to help her and tells Derrick that she has other plans.  This causes Kelly to board the ship out of spite.  Later, Derrick tries to pressure her into doing body shots with one of the starlets (on camera, of course) and Jake once again stands up for her; once again, she decides that she definitely wants to do whatever Jake wants to protect her from.  So, let that be a lesson, young men: defending the girl you have a crush on will inevitably turn her into an exhibitionist.  Fact.

It should come as no surprise that the acting in Piranha (2010) is not fabulous.  The cast is surprisingly noteworthy, though.  Elizabeth Shue, Ving Rhames, Richard Dreyfuss, Christopher Lloyd, Adam Scott, Paul Scheer, Ricardo Chavira and Jerry O'Connell all damage their reputations by working in this film.  I'll give the young actors a pass, because work is work, but those established actors should have known better.  The movie also has famous nude model Kelly Brook in a main role, as well as porn stars Riley Steele, Gianna Michaels, and Ashlynn Brooke in small (and, not surprisingly, boobtastic) parts.  I guess I shouldn't be so hard on the actors for being in this movie, really.  B-movies are meant to be silly and fun, for actors as well as audiences.  With that perspective, Jerry O'Connell and Adam Scott turned in shockingly competent/quality-appropriate performances, with Ving Rhames occasionally deciding to overact in between bouts of sleepwalking through scenes.  Shue plays everything pretty straight as the main character; personally, I think that was the wrong angle to take, but I've seen worse.  Eli Roth also had a decent small part, but he was definitely aware of the quality of the movie and his acting.

These piranhas are extra dangerous, because they look like humans!

I hesitate to say that anyone actually directed this movie, but Alexandre Aja took the credit for it.  His direction is absolutely wretched.  You know how ineffective horror movies like to kill time between their theoretically scary scenes by startling you?  Like when the main character walks into a room, hears something behind them, and they turn around while the music simultaneously gets suddenly loud --- and nothing's there.  This movie wishes it was that competent.  In one scene, after the piranhas are loose but before the characters realize it, Jake notices that the inflatable chair Kelly was sitting on just minutes before is now empty --- duh-duh-DUMMM; he calls her name, gets no response, and dives in to find her.  It turns out that she was apparently right behind him on the boat.  Huh.  In the very next scene, the camera shows an empty canoe, which had two children in it the last time we saw it duh-duh-DUMMM; the camera pans to the left a few feet and shows the kids on the shore.  If film directing could be described in Monopoly terms, Alexandre Aja is pure Baltic Avenue.

You tell 'em, Uncle Pennybags!

What made this movie so bad?  Let me list the ways:

• CGI effects that were only marginally better than SyFy's (far more amusing) rip-off, Mega Piranha
• The film was edited by "Baxter."  No last name needed
• From a cause and effect standpoint, earthquakes cause piranhas
• Okay, imagine you are a teenage boy, living at home and looking at porn on his computer.  Picture it clearly in your mind.  Now...did anyone imagine having their computer screen clearly visible from their doorway for Mom to see when she walks in?  Or did anyone leave the door unlocked?  Amateurs.
• Stupid effing little kids
• The first thing the Wild Wild Girls people know about Jake is that he is seventeen, and they invite him for a day of drinking, drugs, and slut banging?
• Big breasted women can hold their breath for up to five minutes, as long as they are fondling each other underwater
• Whenever the camera takes on an underwater POV perspective, it is always to fake you out.  Piranhas get their own special "piranha view" shots to let you know they are coming
• Piranhas that have spent two million years in dark seclusion still have large eyes that can see
• There is visible light in the subterranean lake
• Most of the scenes from the previews are not in the final movie
• ...and many more!

Nope.  Not in the movie.

Okay, fine.  It's easy to watch a movie that is intentionally stupid and list off its failures.  The challenge is in finding what made the movie work.  For starters, the body count is pretty big.  I counted at least twenty confirmed on-screen deaths, and that doesn't count three scenes that were full of presumed deaths.  There was some pretty good gratuitous nudity in the film, too, but not as much as you might expect from a Spring Break flick.  Besides, all the nudity came from people who take their clothes off professionally; I'm sure this movie is tame compared to their normal work.  But I'm being negative again, sorry.  There was a ton of gore, including smashed-in heads, ripped-off faces, limbs gnawed down to the bone, and even a CGI severed penis (that was eaten and then puked up by a piranha that was "experimenting").  While I didn't see the movie in 3D, I could tell some of the things that were meant for the third dimension, like chopped up fish parts and vomit.  The very last scene of the movie was actually pretty amusing, too.  Oh, and the proposed sequel has (and I'm not joking about this) the working title of Piranha 3DD --- which, I think we can all agree, is brilliant.

But, even when you factor all that in, this movie just isn't stupid enough to be awesome and fun.  Consider this: the best death in the whole movie (Eli Roth's) was not piranha-related.  The second-best death had a girl getting her hair caught in a propeller and getting her face ripped off, which was also not piranha-related.  Heck, most of the piranha attack victims looked like they had been scratched by a large cat or had acid spilled on them.  Silly me, I thought they were supposed to look like they had the flesh eaten off of their bodies.  The script was dumb, and some of the characters were campy, but --- and I can't believe that I'm writing this --- it needed to be so much dumber and campier to work for me.  This is stupid-bad, not so-bad-it's-good.  So, even though it was being deliberately bad, it wasn't bad enough to be enjoyable.  On the plus side, though, boobs and gore.

Leap Year

I would like to take the time to point out the colorization of this movie poster.  If you can't get a good look at the actors' eyes, check it out the next time you're at Best Buy or Target or wherever.  Their eyes are glowing.  Seriously, zoom in to the picture.  This guy's eyes look either completely photoshopped, or he is about to ask where the Keymaster is.  Either way, it is bad news for this movie; either it is cheap enough to use terrible photo editing, or it is trying to draw comparisons to Ghostbusters.  It's a lose-lose situation.

The title Leap Year refers to the Irish tradition that allows women to propose marriage to men on February 29th.  So, I suppose that this movie should have been called February 29th or Leap Year Day.  Fun fact: the actual Leap Year marriage tradition in the English-speaking world isn't necessarily limited to Ireland or that particular day; the whole year is wide open for proposals.  That way, desperate women have a whole year to impose their will upon their unwilling boyfriends.

Anna (Amy Adams) is super successful and is enjoying a high class Boston lifestyle, with fancy clothes, rich friends, and a cardiologist boyfriend, Jeremy (Adam Scott).  It doesn't matter that her job has less redeeming social value than a crack dealer, her friends are bitter and shallow, or that her boyfriend is self-centered and shows off heart surgery pictures during dinner.  You're supposed to like Anna and sympathize with her problem.  What problem, you ask?  Well, Jeremy was spotted leaving a fancy jewelry shop, so Anna and her friend (Kaitlin Olson) freak out like those commercials where they say "He went to JARED!"  Well, Jeremy and Anna have a special dinner date planned for the night before he has to leave for Dublin, Ireland for a cardiologist conference; Anna assumes that he will propose, but instead, he gives her really nice diamond earrings.  Bastard.  After he has left for Dublin, Anna reflects on something her father told her (John Lithgow, whose two or three minute performance earned him fourth billing in the credits); in Ireland, women can propose to men on February 29th.  And, as you might have guessed, this film takes place during a Leap Year.  The next Leap Year is in 2012, so I suppose that this movie could be seen as a glimpse into our future.  I'm afraid it's neither a romantic nor comedic future.

Anna decides to fly to Dublin right away, but her flight is diverted to Wales because of poor weather conditions.  No planes are flying, and she has to get to Dublin by tomorrow (more on that later), so she charters a small fishing boat.  I didn't notice her trying to rent a car, though.  The ocean waters are too rough to reach Dublin, so Anna is dropped off in Quaint Irish Town, Ireland, which has only one restaurant, one hotel and one taxi service, all of which are run by Declan (Matthew Goode).  Declan is a little ornery, but who wouldn't be?  Anna comes in, is cranky about her whole Leap Year situation, and basically insults his town, tavern, and hotel within minutes of meeting him.  After some hilarious hijinks (it turns out that Anna --- get this --- is a little clumsy and doesn't respect other people's property!  Guffaw!), Declan agrees to take Anna to Dublin for a fee (his tavern is in financial trouble).  Again, hijinks ensue, and Anna accidentally causes Declan's car to crash into a shallow lake.  It will take a day for the tow truck to get the car out, so Anna decides to find another modes of transportation.  Declan follows because, somehow, that qualifies as taking her to Dublin.  Along the way, the two squabble constantly.  You have never seen such a poorly matched couple..unless you're married!  Bada-BING!  And yet...Declan gets in a fight for Anna and expresses sympathy for the fact that her dad is unreliable.  And Anna, in a moment of true mutual understanding, pukes on Declan's shoes.  It's a romantic comedy, so this odd couple will obviously fall in love, but what will happen when Anna finally gets to Dublin and sees Jeremy again?

I disguise this fact pretty well, I know, but I am not a huge romantic comedy fan.  That doesn't mean that I can't like them, I just tend not to because I find them insulting to my intelligence and incredibly not funny.  In all fairness, Leap Year is not god awful.  Amy Adams is able to pull off naive and bubbly any day of the week, and having her as the main character makes sense for a rom-com.  I wouldn't say that her comedic talents are fantastic, but she does play a good straight woman for others to joke around.  She's a likable actress and, when given the right character, she can be fun to watch.  Matthew Goode has some leading man potential; he's reasonably handsome and has an Irish brogue, which the ladies tend to like.  His emotional scenes are subtle, which is nice (although repeated: close your eyes and sigh...now!).  He doesn't immediately appear to be a romantic good guy, so he can get away with playing a bit of a scoundrel, which is a nice change for this genre.

...And that's all the good I can say about this movie.  The premise is ridiculous.  Let's just ignore the accuracy of the tradition this movie describes.  What we are left with is a female lead that is desperate enough to commit to a trans-Atlantic flight to propose to her man.  If the character was portrayed as strong-willed and independent, that would work.  Anna, unfortunately, defines herself by her possessions; she has so many things, but nothing is really important to her.  She doesn't have much of a backstory because she's a fairly shallow character.  A character that is driven by the desire to possess is not romantic or funny; they are desperate and sad.  Do you want a hint that this is a bad premise?  Both Amy Adams and Matthew Goode have lines where they ridicule the Leap Day tradition.  When you have a stupid idea for a movie, you need to be pretty damn funny to make fun of yourself, otherwise you are just pointing out the flaws in your movie. 

Worse than the stupid premise are the Bostonian characters.  We are clearly meant to connect to Anna, to feel her pain throughout.  When she doesn't get proposed to, the audience is expected to feel sorry for her.  Maybe I'm just a guy, but getting nice jewelry doesn't elicit sympathy from me.  I understand that she was let down, but they made this out to be as bad as if her fiance slept with her twin sister.  Her fiance, Jeremy, is supposed to be annoying (so we can root for Matthew Goode), but he's really obnoxious.  Obnoxious to the point of me not liking Anna for dating him.  Everyone is Boston is shown to be petty, selfish and shallow.  Yes, this makes it important for her to go to Ireland --- I get it--- but it's boring, lazy writing that is without the benefit of charm.  Why should I care about Anna, a shallow, somewhat ditzy, desperate woman with nothing of value except a charming smile?  Leap Year doesn't ever give you a reason.

I don't even want to bother with the Irish characters.  It turns out that most of them have been trapped in a limerick for a few decades and are just now getting out and about.  On the bright side, there were no leprechauns.  Although Warwick Davis could have added a much needed twist to this story...hmm...I smell sequel!  And what was with the time frame in this movie?  Anna has to get to Dublin today when she's in the airport, but she spends one night a Declan's inn, one night at a bed and breakfast, and hangs out at a wedding for an entire day.  Oh, and it's still in time for Leap Year Day.  If she's this uptight, Anna is a stone cold bitch.  I don't think that's what the writers mean to convey; I think they just assumed that the audience's frontal lobe would have turned to tapioca halfway through the film and they could get away with minor problems like time being an important plot device for this movie.

In a word: ugh.  I'll give credit where it's due to the two leads (despite Adams' terrible character), but it's nowhere near enough to make this watchable.  Director Anand Tucker deserves some credit for their chemistry (and lack thereof), but he undoubtedly should get the majority of the blame for the horrible supporting roles and predictable story.  Then again, I'm a guy, so take this with a grain of well-argued salt.