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"End Game", the President is
assassinated while under the diligent protection
of über Secret Service agent Alex Thomas (Cuba
Gooding Jr.), who takes a bullet through the hand,
but suffers even more from personal guilt. For you
see, the killing shot wouldn't have hit the
President if it hadn't bounced off Thomas' hand
first. (In a bit of trivia, just 10 years ago Jack
Scalia, who plays the President here, would be
playing the Thomas role.) Enter intrepid reporter
Kate Crawford (Angie Harmon), whose investigation
leads her to believe a conspiracy is afoot. After
a failed hit on his life and Kate's, Thomas
quickly becomes a believer, but as we all know,
realizing that there is a conspiracy and proving
it are two entirely different matters.
Directed by former Tae Kwon
Do champ and stuntman Andy Cheng, "End
Game" is not altogether a bad action
thriller. Oh sure, the conspiracy has almost no
complexity to it, but the action is quite good,
and the stars are more than up to the task. Far
removed from his Oscar winning role in "Jerry
Maguire" (not to mention a slew of really,
really bad comedies), Cuba Gooding Jr. is
surprisingly believable as an action star, chasing
after bad guys with steely determination and
leaping out of ponds with weapon in hand with the
best of them. Former "Law and Order"
babe Angie Harmon's Kate Crawford plays the
comedic sidekick to Gooding's straight man, and is
so charming that one wishes she had more to do
after the film's 30 minute mark. You also have to
imagine what a nice change of pace this must have
been for Gooding, who is usually saddled with the
sidekick role.
Alas, the script by director
Andy Cheng and J.C. Pollock has plot holes the
size of Cuba Gooding Jr.'s bald head. The bad
guys, led by perennial menacing henchman Peter
Greene, are not the brightest masterminds in the
world, resorting to good ol fashion explosives in
order to conceal their meticulously planned
conspiracy. Hey, an old lady and her daughter
living in a trailer may
know something. Blow'em up! Guys, I think that
secret service agent and the reporter may know something. Blow'em up! You would think people who have
conspired to kill the President would be a bit
more discreet about covering their tracks. These
guys don't even know the meaning of the word.
Although to be fair, instead of blowing up the bum
that may
know something, they just burn the guy to death.
How quaint.
But while intricate
conspiracy plotting is shamefully shortchanged,
"End Game's" real concern is the action,
and Cheng and company certainly knows what they're
doing in this area. In one of the film's best
sequence, Thomas is on foot pursuing a suspect who
is fleeing in a truck just used in a hit-and-run.
Thomas manages to shoot out the truck's windows,
but the suspect escapes when Thomas is grabbed by
cops (he was, after all, a crazy guy running down
the street with a gun). But here's the good part:
instead of the chase being over, the suspect
decides to come back for a drive-by on Thomas and
the cops! Priceless.
Although not a full-fledged
A-list Hollywood production (it clocks in with a
budget of $20 million), "End Game" does
have a number of glorified cameos, most notably
James Woods as the do-nothing head of the Secret
Service, and Burt Reynolds, whose face is looking
mighty shiny post -- well, whatever it was he had
done to his mug. Woods, in particular, has a
thankless role, although his character did
participate in an incredibly (albeit
unintentionally) hilarious moment when Thomas,
after shooting two guys who had tried to kill him
at his house and getting into a wild gunfight with
a motorist earlier in the day, goes to Woods to
ask for manpower in order to continue the
investigation. As expected, Woods turns him down,
but here's the kicker: even though he's the head
of the Secret Service, Woods had
no idea that one of his agents recently
escaped an assassination attempt and was in a
street shootout earlier in the day! Sheesh, no
wonder the President got shot.
Like most films about
government conspiracies and cover-ups, there's a
"final mastermind" that needs to be
uncovered by the film's heroes. "End
Game" throws a couple of red herrings at us
using its two big names (Woods and Reynolds), but
the two men have so few scenes in the entire movie
that it's hard to take them seriously as the
hidden mastermind. As a result, the Big Reveal is
perfunctory, probably because the audience had
already figured out the mastermind's identity
before the film's heroes did. Although to give the
film credit, the reasons behind the assassination
was indeed very unexpected, if overly trite.
As a political thriller,
"End Game" easily delivers on the
thriller part, but is nowhere bright enough to
survive the political section. It's a
plot-by-numbers conspiracy movie, with some
winning performances from Gooding Jr. as a hardass
gunman on a mission and Angie Harmon as his
attractive sidekick. As well, the action scenes
are very worthwhile; there aren't a whole lot of
them, but they pack quite a punch. If you went
into the film not expecting anything overly clever
in the plotting department, then "End
Game" should meet your lowered expectations.
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