Endgame (2006)- Cuba Gooding Jr. (2 ½ )

Director: Andy Cheng

Stars: Cuba Gooding Jr, Angie Harmon, & James Woods

Genre: Action/Thriller/Crime/Drama

MPAA Rating: R (violence and some language)

Running Time: 93 Mins

Tagline:” The Assassination Was Only The Beginning.”

Synopsis:

{According to IMDB}

"A secret Service agent and a news reporter investigate the conspiracy behind the assassination of the President. "

Discussion

It’s surprising to see an academy award winning actor like Cuba Gooding Jr joining the forces of the DTV market. After seeing him in such movies like Men of Honor and Jerry McGuire, I decided to give his straight to video movies a try and Frankly, I didn’t do a bad choice in renting this one.

Cuba plays a secret service agent Alex Thomas; assigned to protect the President of the United States. On a day of a speech, Alex takes a bullet for the President, unfortunately the bullet goes through his hand and into the president’s head.  Unable to cope with the guilt his  his life goes into an abyss of alcohol abuse. But,little does he know that there is more to this assassination; In comes female reporter Kate Crawford (Angie Harmon) she is convinced that the assaination is a consiracy and theres more to it than just politics. She goes to Alex for help, she notices that anyone she asks about the assassination end up getting killed in what “looks” like an accident. Both Alex and Kate eventually get on the trail to figure why someone would have the president killed, and the motives behind it.

While not a bad movie, it does however suffer from mediocre storytelling and poor character development. This movie felt at times a bit similar to Eastwood’s ‘”In the Line of Fire”. I give them some credit for adding a plot twist at the end, but it still leaves a whole lot of questions unanswered. It was as if the movie was trying to be clever, but ultimately relied more on being what it was- an action flick.  But, it did the job of entertaining me for 93 minutes. The action was decent, well choreographed, a cool chase scenes. Not bad for DTV, much better than a typical Seagal DTV flick. Also there’s a funny random scene involving Cuba farting in front of angle’s face. I was like WTF? Haha

Bottom Line: 

Give it a rent, not bad to watch just for the entertainment, there might be some confusing stuff going around at times, but aside from that, it still pretty entertaining. It still sucks that academy award winner has taken this route in film, once made famous by Seagal. But again, its better than any of Seagal’s recent atrocities.

theatrical trailer