Sizzling Action Meets Screwball Antics in Marky Mark’s Silly Crime Caper
Hollywood is at it again with its latest attempt to mix high-octane bullets with low-brow laughs in The Big Hit, a movie that looks to turn the neighborhood movie theater into a full-blown circus. The story follows a remarkably polite hitman named Melvin Smiley who, when he isn’t executing contracts for the mob, is busy letting everyone in his personal life walk all over him. Desperate for some extra cash to satisfy his greedy relationships, Melvin teams up with his fellow professional killers for an off-the-books kidnapping gig that goes horribly wrong before the ink on the ransom note can even dry.
What these high-priced trigger-men do not realize is that the teenage girl they have stuffed into a car trunk happens to be the goddaughter of their own ruthless crime boss. To make matters worse, the girl’s father is a newly bankrupt electronics tycoon who could not scrape together a million bucks if his life depended on it. As the walls close in, Melvin is forced to juggle a full-scale mob hit squad, an angry teenager tied up in his garage, and a dinner date with his demanding fiancée’s parents. It is a frantic setup designed to keep audiences guessing whether they should be shielding their eyes from the explosions or laughing at the absolute stupidity of it all.
Review by Ben Dover
I swear, these hotshot Hollywood executives must think the moviegoing public has the brains of a goldfish. I sat down to watch The Big Hit on my streaming gadget, and within five minutes my blood pressure was higher than a kite. This movie is trying so hard to be hip, cool, and modern that it completely forgets how to be an actual motion picture. It is directed by some fellow named Che-Kirk Wong, but it feels like it was edited by a teenager who drank six cans of soda and got his hands on a video splicing machine. Every third scene transition is flashing and buzzing like an MTV music video. It is plain obnoxious.
The main character is this kid Melvin Smiley, played by Mark Wahlberg. Now, I do not understand today’s youth at all, especially these young actors who think acting means taking your shirt off and flexing in the mirror. Melvin is supposed to be a cold-blooded killer, but he has this ridiculous, pathological need for everyone to like him. He is dating two different women who are draining his bank account dry because he is too much of a pushover to just say no. A hitman with codependency issues? Give me a clean break. Back in my day, movie killers like Clint Eastwood did not care if you liked them, they just shot the bad guys and went home.
The plot gets completely derailed when Melvin and his buddies kidnap a high school girl named Keiko. It turns out she is the goddaughter of their mob boss, Paris. So now, the boss hires Cisco, who is actually one of the kidnappers, to find out who did it. Cisco immediately throws Melvin under the bus to save his own skin. The whole thing turns into a giant, chaotic mess where thousands of bullets are flying around and somehow nobody ever gets hit unless the script says so. It is like watching a live-action cartoon, and not a good one.
The absolute lowest point of this whole fiasco is when Melvin is trying to have a nice dinner with his fiancée and her parents, and a hit squad shows up and starts blowing the house to smithereens. The parents, played by Elliott Gould and Lainie Kazan, are acting like they are in some cheap, over-the-top comedy sketch while guns are going off. Gould is running around drunk, throwing up, and making crummy jokes. I felt embarrassed just watching a respected veteran actor degrade himself like that.
Is it completely unwatchable? No, I suppose not if you turn your brain completely off and store it in the refrigerator. There is one genuinely funny sequence about an hour into the movie involving a video store rental tape that actually gave me a chuckle. But one laugh in a ninety-minute movie is a pretty lousy return on investment. It is a muddled mush of styles that just ends up giving you a headache.
Star Studded Cast
- Mark Wahlberg as Melvin Smiley: The underwear-model-turned-actor spends half his screen time without a shirt, working out over the opening credits. He plays a hitman who is a total pushover in his personal life. His performance is flat as a board, and you never really buy him as a tough guy.
- Lou Diamond Phillips as Cisco: Phillips goes completely over the top as the treacherous, hip-hop-talking coworker who betrays Melvin. He spends the movie spinning knives and yelling like a lunatic. It is loud, obnoxious, and incredibly grating.
- China Chow as Keiko Nishi: The teenage girl who gets kidnapped. She does an okay job, but her character falls in love with her kidnapper within about twenty minutes. They call it Stockholm Syndrome, I call it lazy writing.
- Avery Brooks as Paris: The big, scary mob boss who commands the screen. He is the only fellow in this movie who actually looks like he belongs in a crime film, but he is completely wasted in this circus.
- Christina Applegate as Pam Shulman: Melvin’s demanding fiancée who only seems to care about money and what her overbearing parents think.
Special Effects and Technical Nonsense
The special effects in this thing are a joke. There is a scene early on where Wahlberg’s character jumps out of a high-rise building on a bungee cord right as the whole place explodes. The green screen and computerized effects look so incredibly fake it made my eyes ache. Cars explode and fly into trees, then drop out of trees, and then the movie plays a trick where someone gets blown up but turns out to be totally fine in the next scene. It completely ruins any sense of danger.
The Noise They Call Music
The soundtrack is composed by Graeme Revell, and it is just a pumping, non-stop wall of noise designed to make you feel like you are in a crowded nightclub. It is full of loud late-nineties electronic beats and rap music that did nothing but irritate my eardrums. There is no melody, no class, just pure audio aggression to cover up the bad dialogue.
Ben Dover’s Rating
★½☆☆☆ (1.5 out of 5 Stars)
Complete Synopsis and Detailed Plot Breakdown
The film kicks off by showing us the daily routine of Melvin Smiley, a highly skilled hitman who works with a crew consisting of Cisco, Crunch, Vince, and Gump. They pull off a massive, incredibly loud hit on a high-rise building where Melvin does all the heavy lifting while his buddies just stand around and look tough. Despite making heaps of cash from his hits, Melvin is completely broke because he is supporting a high-maintenance mistress named Chantel and a demanding fiancée named Pam. Because Melvin cannot handle the idea of anyone disliking him, he lets both women manipulate and bleed him dry.
Desperate for a big payday to satisfy his women, Melvin agrees to a rogue kidnapping plot cooked up by Cisco. They snatch a young girl named Keiko Nishi from her school bus, planning to demand a one-million-dollar ransom from her wealthy father, Jiro Nishi, a Japanese electronics executive. The plan immediately falls apart when they realize two major problems: first, Jiro Nishi is actually completely bankrupt due to a massive movie flop he funded, and second, Keiko is the goddaughter of their own mob boss, Paris.
When Paris finds out his goddaughter has been taken, he flies into a rage and orders Cisco to find the kidnappers and execute them. A panicked Cisco immediately kills the rookie of their group, Gump, and sets up Melvin to take the entire fall for the crime. Meanwhile, Melvin is stuck keeping Keiko tied up in his garage while trying to host a weekend dinner for Pam’s incredibly judgmental, overbearing Jewish parents. During the dinner, Melvin actually starts to bond with Keiko, who points out that he is completely whipped by the women in his life.
The dinner is utterly ruined when Cisco’s hit squad invades the house, sparking a massive shootout. During the gunfight, Melvin’s fiancée admits she was going to dump him anyway. Melvin escapes with Keiko, and they realize they are falling for each other. Melvin finally grows a backbone, tracks down his mistress Chantel, and dumps her on the spot.
The whole movie culminates in a ridiculous final showdown between Melvin and Cisco inside a local video rental store. Even while trading gunfire, the pathologically honest Melvin insists on returning an overdue copy of the movie King Kong Lives to avoid a late fee. After a brutal fistfight, Melvin manages to kill Cisco by stabbing him, but Cisco manages to activate an explosive device right before he dies. The video store blows sky high, but Melvin miraculously survives by shielding himself behind a massive, solid gold promotional movie standee that belonged to Keiko’s father. In the end, Melvin and Keiko ride off into the sunset together, while Jiro Nishi gets his money back by selling the movie rights to his daughter’s kidnapping.
Famous Quotes
- Crunch: “I said LAN-O-LIN, not that aloe-vera bullshit! Get it right, mutha fucka!”
- Cisco: “Oh! ‘Improve!’ What are you… Meryl-fuckin’-Streep?”
- Melvin Smiley: “To be perfectly honest, I can’t stand the idea of anybody not liking me.”
- Keiko Nishi: “It sounds pretty dysfunctional… You’re ‘whipped’.”
- Cisco: “Together! ‘Ya got your shit together,’ ya non-word-rememberin’ motherfucker!”
- I just wanted to sail my boat, have some dolphins come swimming up alongside…maybe even shoot a couple of em
- The Trace buster buster!
Interesting Facts
- The movie marks the big-screen acting debut of China Chow, who is the daughter of the famous restaurateur Michael Chow.
- Action superstar John Woo served as an executive producer on the film, which explains why there are so many ridiculous slow-motion gunfights and explosions.
- The movie features a running gag about a “Trace Buster,” an absurd fictional gadget used to disrupt people who are trying to trace phone calls.
- Mark Wahlberg and China Chow actually started dating in real life after meeting on the set of this movie.
- The film was a massive box office disappointment, earning barely over $27 million against a hefty production budget.
Photos
Trailer
Review Notes
What the hell was that chicken scene gross.
Lou Diamond Philips is great, he is always great and doesn’t get near enough credit.
This movie is so bad it kind of rounds the corner to kind of good, or at least a fun watch, I really wanted to be doing MSTK style hammering while watching it.
Watching this movie as an adult definitely felt a bit weird when there’s sexual tension between the adult man and the high school girl he kidnapped… Another Andy special 😉
I refuse to believe that China Chow is her actual name.
This movie seems to know what it is and absolutely revels in it, refreshing in a way. The fun kind of bad movie.
OK the end I guess he is going to bang the high school chick… It wasn’t that different a time, was uncool even in 1998