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.

Hot Tub Time Machine

I guess the big question with Hot Tub Time Machine is why anyone would ever need a review to tell them about this movie.  If the title doesn't explain it all to you, then what can I do to help?  It's a stupid title for a movie that has no intentions of being anything more or less than a stupid comedy.  To be completely honest, the gloriously stupid title (the best since Snakes On a Plane) would have been enough to convince me to watch this movie.  Adding in John Cusack and Craig Robinson is just icing on the cake.

The premise is that three one-time best friends are now eking out sad existences.  Adam's (Cusack) girlfriend has just moved out and apparently taken most of his belongings.  The only person he sees regularly is his nephew, Jacob (Clark Duke), who spends all his time in his basement room playing video games.  Nick (Robinson) is married to a controlling wife (who insisted he hyphenate his last named when they got married) and his job includes cleaning the feces out of rich people's dogs.  They are brought together when Lou (Rob Corddry), an alcoholic party animal, makes the mistake of revving his engine in time to Motley Crue's "Home Sweet Home" with the garage door closed.  Someone (who could this possibly be?  It's late at night, he lives alone, and the garage is closed!) saves his life and the hospital assumes that this was a failed suicide attempt.  Since Lou's family hates him and he has no real friends, his childhood buddies, Adam and Jacob, rally to his hospital bedside.  They don't talk to Lou any more because "he's an asshole," but they agree to take care of him because "he's [their] asshole."  If you don't have someone like that in your circle of friends, chances are, you're that guy.

Lou assures them that it was just an accident, but they decide that the best way to cheer up a hard-drinking forty year-old adolescent is to relive their youthful debauchery by visiting their old stomping grounds.  These stomping grounds happen to be a ski town that has all but been condemned; the town's stores are all out of business and their formerly hedonistic hotel is now filled with the elderly and their cats.  The group (which includes Jacob, for some reason) gets their old room, which comes with a broken hot tub.  The hotel repairman (Chevy Chase) fixes it so that glows with a yellow light that makes the water a suspicious shade of urine yellow, but the group strips down and gets hot tub drunk right away.

When they wake up, it is 1986.  The three friends now inhabit their eighteen year-old bodies and are at the bustling ski resort in the prime of their lives.  Jacob has also gone back in time, although no explanation is given as to how or why he is in his own modern day body.  The group is warned by the repairman not to change anything in the past, but that plan gets old fast.  Adam has the chance to avoid dumping the perfect girlfriend, Nick can redeem his musical dreams, Lou can drink a lot and try to get laid, and Jacob can try prevent his existence from being wiped out by the group changing the future.  There are a lot of 80s jokes, some gratuitous breasts, a few shots of Corddry's naked butt, and a lot of slapstick comedy.  Some of it works, some of it doesn't, but it's all pretty stupid.

For being so obviously dumb, this movie had some pretty solid direction.  Steve Pink is better known as a screenwriter (he wrote High Fidelity and Grosse Point Blank), but he has a gift for catching humor with his camera.  Some of that is obviously due to him giving the cast some leeway with their lines, but I'll give Pink credit for making this ridiculous movie not come off as amateurish.

The main cast is pretty good, too.  John Cusack is always likable in his movies, even though he hasn't made a great one in a while.  Craig Robinson is rapidly becoming a reliable quality gauge for stupid comedies.  His deadpanning into the camera the phrase "hot tub time machine" is worth seeing the movie for, just by itself.  Clark Duke plays a chubby nerd this time, expanding on his varied film credits that include "chubby dork," "chubby dweeb," and the adjective-less "nerd."  What will make or break your enjoyment of this movie is how much you like Rob Corddry.  Most of the film's humor comes from him, including every single cheap or gross-out joke in the script.  Personally, I got tired of him pretty quickly, but he still made me laugh on occasion, which I found impressive.  Usually, when I am turned off by a comedic character, there is no way back into my good graces (I'm judgmental like that), but his timing was good and some of his lines are brilliant.  He's really, really obnoxious, though.

The supporting cast is surprisingly full decent performances.  Of course, Chevy Chase has fun as the nutty/supernatural repairman, so he's decent enough.  Crispin Glover gets some laughs as a bellboy doomed to lose his arm...somehow.  Thomas Lennon has a cameo that is a little funny, I guess, but nothing special.  The young cast was surprisingly decent, too.  Sebastian Stan overacted as the stereotypical 80s movie ski jerk, but this isn't a movie that requires subtlety, so it worked well.  Similarly, Lyndsy Fonseca and Collette Wolfe played their ditzy snow bunny slut roles as well as the roles demanded.  Lizzy Caplan did well as Cusack's "true" love interest, and they managed to give the movie something a little deeper than a stupid slapstick comedy deserves.

Are there any flaws in this film?  Well, yeah.  But to detail the film's scientific and logical flaws is missing the point.  You don't think a movie titled Hot Tub Time Machine really cares do you?  If this sounds like a stupid movie, you're absolutely right.  It's dumb and embraces that level of cleverness fully.  It's definitely better than the title implies, but a lot of the jokes generate chuckles instead of laughs.  Admittedly, a big part of that for me was because I didn't really have fun with Rob Corddry's character, even though he had some of the film's best lines.  This movie's biggest flaw was in giving the bulk of the humor to the least likable character.  Corddry carried this film's humor, even though there were several other actors capable of chipping in.  I thought Craig Robinson was underused, despite his theoretically main character status.  Chevy Chase, Thomas Lennon and Crispin Glover could have done more, too.  As far as stupid slapstick goes, there are certainly worse movies to watch, but this just isn't funny enough to satisfy me.