- Directed by Che-Kirk Wong
- Written by Ben Ramsey
- Starring
- Mark Wahlberg
- Lou Diamond Phillips
- Christina Applegate
- Avery Brooks
- Bokeen Woodbine
- Produced by Wesley Snipes and Warren Zide
- Executive produced by Terence Chang, John M. Eckert, and John Woo
Despite the number of movies that have been made about hitmen, it’s awfully hard to find one that really satisfies. Most of them try to feature a hitman protagonist while shirking away from the essential contradiction, the good man who kills people, that makes the idea compelling. The Big Hit should get some minor props for playing with, if not dealing with, this contradiction. But the movie falls apart in too many other respects because it can’t quite figure out what it’s supposed to be about.
Mel Smiley (Mark Wahlberg) is a hitman, and a nice guy. More than that: He’s a milksop. His “professional” friends take advantage of him by maneuvering im into agreeing to store bodyparts for the weekend for free. His black girlfriend (Lela Rochon) drains him of his money for her car and condo, even while she’s giving it up for someone else. His Jewish fiancee Pam (Christina Applegate), while nicer about it, drains whatever money he has left, and still hasn’t told her parents that they’re engaged… or that he’s not Jewish.
He is, admittedly, very good at his job, as showcased in a long and welldone action sequence, in which he and the rest of the hit team employed by crime lord Paris (Avery Brooks) assault a secured highrise to take out a rival crime boss and white slaver. In fact, he’s so good that the rest of his team, led by con man Sisco (Lou Diamond Phillips), hang back and goldbrick while Mel does all of the heavy lifting. And just to drive the knife home, Sisco contests Mel’s claim to have actually pulled the trigger on the target, and Mel voluntarily gives up the attending bonus from Paris. Even being a contract killer is no guarantee that people won’t walk all over you.
 |
Ooh, that’s some impressive breakdancing! |
All of which leaves Mel considerably behind on his financial obligations, so when Sisco proposes an “extra-curricular” activity behind Paris’ back, Mel joins in. Also along are Crush (Bokeem Woodbine), who continuously raves about the new-found pleasures of self-gratification instead of bothering with all of that interpersonal stuff, and Gump (Robin Dunne), who’s completely brainfried; I think he completes all of two sentences in the entire movie without losing his train of thought.
Their plan is to kidnap the daughter of multimillionare Mr. Nishi (Sab Shimono) for ransom. That’s right; a movie called The Big Hit isn’t actually about a hit, it’s about a ransom kidnapping. I haven’t seen such a dishonest title since Don Knotts and Tim Conway starred in The Private Eyes (1981), in which there were no private eyes; Knotts and Conway played police inspectors.
The joke is sorta on the hitmen already, though, because Mr. Nishi has just gone completely broke, thanks to financing a multi-million-dollar motion picture vanity project which he wrote, directed, and starred in, “Taste the Golden Spray” (and no, I’m not going to touch that with a ten-foot pole). Ha! He has no money to pay a ransom! How funny is that? Not very funny at all, actually, since it rarely gets mentioned and makes absolutely no difference to the story.
 |
You wanna see Christina Applegate in bed? Fine. Here ya go. |
Mel, posing as a limo driver, picks Keiko Nishi (drop-dead gorgeous China Chow) from her private school, and the hijinx begin. Keiko is exactly as smartmouthed as hostages in movies always are, even after she sees Mel blow her boyfriend away (granted, said boyfriend was at the time trying to date-rape Keiko, but still — a little trauma, please?). And it doesn’t help that mastermind Sisco doesn’t really have a masterful mind. Laugh as she tries to ready the hastily-scribbled ransom note into the tape recorder! Laugh again when Sisco screws up the tape recorder when calling Mr. Nishi with his demands and accidentally plays all the wrong parts! These are the jokes, folks.
Mel is of course pressured into “housing” their hostage until they get the ransom money, so he stows her in his girlfriend’s place — the girlfriend, after all, knows what he does for a living, while his fiancee doesn’t. But this is also the same weekend that said girlfriend decides to light out for LA with her boytoy plaything, leaving all of Mel’s possessions (including Keiko and the aforementioned body parts) at his home. Oh, and it’s also the weekend on which Pam’s parents (played by Lainie Kazan and Elliott Gould) are coming to meet their would-be goy-in-law. Can’t you just feel the wackiness?
Yes, there are the expected scenes of Mel keeping the neighbor’s dog away from the bags full of human remains, and the expected scenes of Mel ferrying his gagged and tied hostage from room to room, keeping her away from the unsuspecting fiancee and houseguests. Because this is a movie and nothing at all like real life, Keiko is kinda taken with Mel’s soft-spoken and accomodating ways — he’s real gentlemanly when he helps her go to the bathroom, after all. Why, she even ends up helping him make a gourmet kosher meal while Pam and her parents are gone to temple, giving us quite possibly the most alluring chicken-stuffing scene ever committed to celluloid.
 |
“And what say I arrange a little ‘transporter accident,’ hm?” |
But — and yes, this IS the major kicker — Mr. Nishi is an electronics expert. In fact, Nishi Electronics is the manufacturer of the TraceBuster that Sisco and Gump use to call in their ransom demand. And not only that, but Mr. Nishi’s best friend — and Keiko’s godfather — is none other than Paris.
So when Paris calls Sisco in, tells him that someone in their organization has committed a grievous offense, and charges him with tracking down whoever has had the temerity to kidnap Keiko… Yup, Mel’s going to get the short end again.
Now, let me say a few words about story structure. (Oh fer crying out loud, there he goes again blathering about structure and plot mechanics and such.) If you’ve watched any number of movies in your life, you start to get a feel for how stories are constructed and paced. You don’t need to have ever studied screenwriting or drama; you just recognize it as “beginning/middle/end.” We all expect to feel that the beginning of the movie is over twenty minutes or half an hour into the movie; we all expect to feel that things are starting to head for a wrap-up a similar distance from the end. That’s how we know where we are in the story without looking at our watches. Hollywood types call it “Acts One, Two, and Three,” but I don’t expect you to memorize such specialized technical jargon.
 |
Man, every “caressing the chicken” caption I come up with sounds even dirtier than I mean it to. |
Somehow, The Big Hit mismanages its structure to the point that all of the above feels like Act One. It’s only when we reach this point that we begin to feel that, yeah, things are about to really get started… but now there’s only about half an hour left. It’s like the entire midsection of the movie, the “meat,” got left out.
And with it, anything that approaches believable character development. Pam is just, you know, kinda there. Her parents are a distillment of the secular Jewish couple, her all domineering and beauty-obsessed, him henpecked and resigned to his fate. Keiko falls in love with her captor (though conflicted about wanting to escape) after having interacted with him for all of twenty minutes (and, may I remind you, after having seen said captor blow her boyfriend’s brains out) for no other reason than the fact that it’s in the script.
The only person we really get to know is Mel Smiley, and that because great lengths are gone to to spell his personality out. He says it twice, to different people: He hates the idea of anyone not liking him. That’s once too many. (Actually, you could make the case that it’s twice too many, but I’m feeling generous.) He even has a nightmare of Pam saying, “I don’t like you anymore!” Yes, thank you, we get it. Thank you so much for guaranteeing that even the most facile character traits are idiot-proofed.
 |
Now THERE’S a product placement you don’t expect to see… |
I will grant you that the final showdown, the culmination of not only Mel’s conflict with Sisco but also a long-running subplot about an overdue rental copy of King Kong Lives, may be the best action scene ever staged in a two-story video store. But by that point, all of the jokes are threadbare and all of the plot points are showing their arbitrary nature. (Yes, I’m sure Keiko wants to join Mel in the life of a hired killer because of the continuous adrenaline rush. Despite having so recently been on the receiving end of violent crime.)
And here’s a final note, which may be necessary because of all the non-native English speakers involved in production: The word “m***f***” is not inherently humorous. Honest. especially when rolled out two and three times per second. It just becomes, like so much else in the movie, filler — uncreative placeholders that enblanden their surroundings. We sometimes like a screenplay to be filled with writing, not lazy anti-writing, thank you.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 37
- breasts: 0
- male butts: 3
- explosions: 7
- dream sequences: 1
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
- Avery Brooks (Paris) was, of course, Commander/Captain Sisco on DS9
Discuss This
Respond to This
