End Game (2006)

End Game has decent performances, but the plot is slow-paced, the editing is awful as the film feels like 2 hours and thirty minutes long when it is only actually 1 hour and thirty minutes.We follow this investigator throughout who may as well have the Black Death Plague as everyone she talks to ends up getting killed.This flick is so dull (even though it tries to be exciting) that you don't even care what happens by the end, they try to make the story line mysterious, but it is just tiring.This is not even a standard drama thriller, it's just a boring excuse for a thriller.

Angie Harmon who seems to have more success on the small then the big screen with Law&Order and Rizzoli&Isles to her credit teams up with Cuba Gooding, Jr. to investigate nothing less than the assassination of President Jack Scalia. In fact it was rather a freakish event in and of itself. The assassin's bullet passed through Secret Service Agent Gooding's hand and may have changed direction ever so slightly and killed Scalia. That's left Gooding bummed and looking for answers.Harmon plays an investigative reporter looking for the truth as well. But this particular president led a secret life as well along the lines of JFK and Gooding was the one who kept the secrets. He and Harmon team up for the investigation, but Gooding feels a loyalty to his former boss and wants to preserve his legacy. At some point they could be working at cross purposes.The action is exciting however the story had a lot of holes in it. Harmon and Gooding work well together. They could have used some better direction as well. Playing a most mysterious role is a retired general Burt Reynolds. He definitely knows more than he's letting out.Fans of the two leads should like this one.

**MAJOR SPOILERS** With his second term coming to an end as the President, Jack Scalia, is about to give his farewell address to a overflow and cheering crowd in the nation's capital tragedy strikes. As fate would have it he never made it to the podium to give his speech.As the assassin, with a forged journalist badge, pops out of the crowd and gets off a shot the President's personal Secret Service man Alex Thomas (Cuba Goodling Jr), who's job it is to guard him with his life, sticks out his hand and the bullet hits and ricochets off it. This courageous act on Agent Thomas' part causes the assassin's bullet, that would have missed, to hit the president in the chest leaving him mortally wounded. The assassin Lewis Detimore, Patrick Treadway, is killed on the spot by Agent Thomas and a number of other Secret Service agents before he can get off a second shot that may well had hit the First Lady, Anne Archer, and killed her as well.At first the killer is thought to be your average lone nut assassin with the case of the murdered president solved before the story hit the morning papers. Not for a moment believing the official story nosy and hot-shot Washington Inlander reporter Kate Crawford, Angle Harmon, smelled a big scoop and went after it. Uncovering the dead assassin's background Kate soon realizes that Detimore who was dying of cancer was in fact a Lee Harvey Oswald-like pasty planted at the scene to take the heat off those who really had the president done in.Getting in touch with a now dead drunk and guilt-ridden Agent Thomas, over his inability of not saving the president's life, Kate tries to get him to realize that there's more to the president's murder then what meets the eye or makes the 6:00 O'Clock Evening News. It's not Kate who convinces Thomas but a number of operatives, in the president's assassination, who soon end up dead in their trying to murder both him and Kate in order to keep their mouths shut!Your basic conspiracy movie that has both Agent Thomas and reporter Kate Crawford in the both gun and bomb sights of those who did in the President of the United States. As it becomes more and more obvious to the American public, through Kate's reporting, that the deceased assassin, Lewis Detimore, didn't act alone Secret Service Chief Vaughn Stevens, James Woods, makes the uncovering of who was behind the president's murder top priority. You soon begin to realize that the top priority that Stephens has in mind is really to cover his and is agency's a** in not preventing the assassination then in finding out who actually committed it!Not at first really knowing it Agent Thomas had, in trying to cover up his beloved president's secret life, already solved who was the person responsible and the reason behind the murder the president! But as it later tuned out Thomas was either too naive or unmotivated, in not consciously wanting to believe who had the president killed, that he completely overlooked it!***SPOILER ALERT*** The shocking truth, after about a dozen people end up getting killed in the film, to who set up the president and who in fact was the brains behind his murder really isn't that shocking at all. Having stepped on a number of powerful peoples toes during his tenure as the President of the United States those who wanted to do the President in not only had the means in doing it but also very personal reasons for having it done! And what both Agent Thomas and reporter Kate Crawford were soon to find out, to their utter shock and frustration, is that these very powerful people were too far up the totem pole, in the Washington D.C political establishment, to ever be brought to justice for doing it!

At first, I thought this movie was one of those clever movies that are so complicated you don't get it until right near the end. Then the end came (abruptly) and I was still none the wiser. Then(!), I thought that maybe it was supposed to leave you guessing. But the more I think about it, that's not the case at all. It was just plain crap. There were no subliminal clues and clever plot, just used toilet roll for a storyline!This film appears to me (especially towards the end) as if about 20 minutes of footage has been removed from the final cut - unfortunately those 20 mins contain the answers to the characters questions! This film is like 'Memento' in how messed up it is, except this film plays forwards.