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.

Brick

I did not have a particularly scandalous high school career; it should come as no surprise that I spent a lot of time reading and watching movies.  When I did manage to poke my head out, though, I was surprised by all the drama I found my peers involved in.  Fights, dating, drugs, alcohol, sex, pregnancy --- high school has it all.  Most movies about high school focus on superficial social cliques, but Brick makes a deliberate and stylistic decision to focus on the seedy underbelly of high school.

Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is an outsider by choice in his high school.  He's cool enough to earn some respect from nearly everyone in school, but he is indifferent to his social status and chooses to spend his time alone, whenever possible.  His ex-girlfriend, Emily (Emilie de Ravin), called him in a panic one day, rambling on about a bad brick and the Pin.  What on Earth does that mean?  Brendan starts to nose around and finds that Emily is involved in the school's drug trade, although it is unclear how much trouble she is in.  That gets a little less mysterious when Brendan finds her dead body in a storm drain.  Instead of calling the police or talking to his principal or any other adult, Brendan decides to uncover the responsible party for Emily's death at any cost.  To do that, he must infiltrate the same dangerous groups that somehow got Emily killed, figure out who played who in this mess, and muddle his way to a clear answer, all without being hassled by his principal (Richard Roundtree) and the police.

Brick is not just another high school movie.  It's actually a neo-noir that just happens to be set in a high school setting.  A lot of your appreciation for this film will depend on how open you are to that idea.  Noir is not typically given unique settings; it typically has tough guys and dangerous women, where the only thing you can truly believe is that everybody lies.  That's a little more adult-themed than some people like their high schoolers.  Personally, I thought it was an inspired idea, although the setting did cause a few minor problems for me.

The acting in Brick depends heavily on Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performance.  The lead role in noirs is typically a guy who is smarter than everybody else, and the viewer realizes things at about the same pace as the main character; he just jumps to some conclusions a little faster than the audience, sometimes.  Gordon-Levitt does a really good job of filling those noir shoes.  This is a plot-propelled film, but his too-cool-for-school performance helped this fairly standard noir plot feel a little more special.  I'm not a fan of noir characters that show their feelings, but he also did a good job showing believable grief, when the time came.

Noir heroes take a licking, but keep on playing both sides against the middle.

The rest of the cast primarily just filled their roles, but there were a few parts that were odd and varied enough to stick out.  I thought Noah Fleiss did a surprisingly good job as the hot-headed Tugger, the muscle for the drug trade.  I also liked the absurdity that Lukas Haas brought to the table as the improbably powerful Pin.  Matt O'Leary was okay as the Brain, but it was kind of an easy role.  Of course, no noir would be complete without a few dangerous women.  I wasn't too impressed with Emilie de Ravin, but I thought Nora Zehetner did a passable job as a femme fatale.  As for Richard Roundtree's brief appearance as the school principal, it was almost like he was Reverse Shaft; he was the straight man, while Gordon-Levitt told him how it was going to be, and if he didn't like it, tough.  As a Shaft fan, that was a little hard to swallow.

Writer/director Rian Johnson managed to do a lot of things right with this film.  The pacing is crisp, and he is able to convey urgency and mystery with the story.  I liked the tone of the movie, and I liked his direction.  At times, it felt a little idiosyncratic, like a lightweight Coen Brothers ripoff, but only because he only hinted at quirkiness and never fully embraced it.  What I liked best about Johnson's writing and directing is that he actually pulled off a noir movie within a high school setting.  That's brilliant!  It takes all the adult issues that high school movies like to toy with, and amps up the seriousness without being morbid, like Kids.  Plus, let's face it, it's just nice to see a high school movie that isn't about fitting in.  Like most high school movies, it overly simplifies the social groupings, but that is a small price to pay for a compelling crime story.

Having said that, I have to admit that it doesn't always work.  By taking the serious tone of film noir, this movie has several scenes that are ridiculous enough to have rough juxtapositions with that tone.  In a hard-boiled crime story, do I really need a scene where the queen of the high school theater clique is talking trash while receiving oral sex from a freshman?  Um, no.  Do we need a scene with our hero being trapped by those that he is hunting to segue into a scene where the villain's mother offers the captured hero some cookies?  Again, no.  I'm not saying that I didn't find those scenes kind of funny, I just think the film lost more than it gained by their inclusion.  Another problem that the high school setting provides is the unexpected realization that noir is oftentimes absurdly melodramatic.  On the one hand, I know that real life isn't anything like a Humphrey Bogart movie, but this film occasionally makes the notion seem just silly.  It does feel intentional, but there are just too many moments in Brick where I had to admit that, while the dialogue might sound cool, it's pretty darned unlikely that anyone would act/speak that way.  The noir aspect of this movie also made the very end of the film more predictable, because there are some character types that simply must fulfill their destiny.

Despite undercutting itself, I really liked Brick.  Is it just because I am a sucker for noir?  Quite possibly, but they did a lot of things right.  Every character interaction for Gordon-Levitt was tough (except for those with his ex-girlfriend) and smart; my favorite was when Nora Zehetner's character was being nice to him, and his response was "You really are dangerous."  That's great.  You just don't get that type of response to romance in normal movies.  Is this movie great?  Probably not, but it is definitely good.  Brick makes the best case I have seen for Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a serious lead actor, and its old-timey noir charm hit all the right buttons for a noirista like me.