Review: The Big Hit (1998)

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The Big Hit

Rating

Director

Che-Kirk Wong

Screenplay

Ben Ramsey

Length

1h 31m

Starring

Mark Wahlberg, Lou Diamond Phillips, Christina Applegate, Avery Brooks, Bokeem Woodbine, Antonio Sabato Jr., China Chow, Lainie Kazan, Elliott Gould

MPAA Rating

Basic Plot

Four professional hit men perform an unauthorized kidnapping and find themselves persued for it.

Review

The Big Hit offers very little hit and too much big.

Sometimes you go into a film and are amazed. Sometimes you go in hoping for something good and get let down. Other times you go into a movie and leave wishing you’d never paid to get in. The Big Hit is this latter.

Melvin Smiley (Wahlberg), Cisco (Lou Diamond Phillips), Crunch (Bokeem Woodbine) and Vinnie (Antonio Sabàto Jr.) are the four hit men who make a killing in the beginning of the film. Crunch takes out the electricity, Cisco and Vinnie “hold off” non-existant men from behind while Melvin takes out nearly all of the guards with very little effort and very little help.

A scene where he bungee jumps from an exploding building is so poorly done that the visual effects make your eyes ache. Not to mention the implausibility.

Vinnie disappears from the picture until the end. The other three take on an inept young punk Gump (Robin Dunne) to assist in a kidnapping that will net them $1 million. There’s only one catch that they don’t anticipate.

Did I say one? I mean several. First the girl they kidnap is the daughter of Jiro Nishi (Sab Shimono) whose recent motion picture “event” failed miserably and is now broke. Another hitch is that the girl is their primary employer’s goddaughter. The last problem is that their employer, Paris (Deep Space Nine’s Avery Brooks), finds out about it and forces one of the gang, unknown as one of the kidnappers to Paris, to find those responsible and kill them.

About this time, the plot decides it once to be one-fifth comedy, one-fifth drama, one-fifth action adventure, one-fifth hong kong action movie and one-fifth stupid. The film fails miserably and collapses under the script’s impossible and absurd script.

Mark Wahlberg crashes and burns in his first outting since the phenomenal Boogie Nights. He runs around the film with his shirt off constantly and even gets to work out over the opening credits.

The rest of the acting is attroctious. There are enough points when the action becomes physical impossible and the subplot of Melvin’s “everyone must like me” attitude become tiring, repetitive, redundant and pointless.

The film fails on so many levels that it’s hard to even remember the ONE extremely funny scene about one hour into the film.