The Big Hit

Year 16, Day 145 - 5/24/24 - Movie #4,735

BEFORE: Wednesday night, I was up in Bedford, NY, north of NYC, working an event at the Bedford Playhouse. I stumbled upon a grand piano there that was used by Paul Shaffer on the "Late Show with David Letterman" set for the whole run of the show, and then I guess he donated it to the theater, which was very nice of him.  It's a little piece of TV history, also I think I must have seen that piano before, because my BFF Andy and I went to see that last Christmas show that Letterman did for his CBS show, and I remember Darlene Love standing on top of the piano (or maybe it was the sax player, not sure) during the performance of "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)".  

(The experience of visiting another theater, when I work three or four days a week at a theater, was a bit like that episode of "Seinfeld" where we see that other diner across town, and there's someone there who looks a bit like George, there's another guy who looks a bit like Kramer, etc. I kept seeing people who reminded me of the theater where I work, but it wasn't them, it was just their Bizarro World counterparts, and yes, there was a guy there who reminded me of me.)

Anyway, the event was a bit of a bust, we didn't really sell much merchandise afterwards, which was the whole point of me going up there, so my whole evening was essentially wasted, the benefit barely made any money, and really, I just wonder why I'm still wasting my time at that job if our event sales are negligible at best.  We can make like $8,000 selling merchandise at New York Comic-Con, but at a theater in an upscale New York community, we only made a few hundred?  Clearly we're not doing something right.  

Today I found out that Morgan Spurlock, the documentary filmmaker famous for directing "Super-Size Me", the film where he ate only McDonald's food for a month, died at the age of 53 - but no, it wasn't the lingering effects of dining at Mickey D's that killed him, it was cancer.  I know the food didn't kill him because his second wife was a vegan chef or something, and she helped him lose the weight he gained after making that film, and then I think he maintained a healthy diet afterwards, at least for a time. 

I met Mr. Spurlock at least twice, I'd tried several times at Sundance in 2004 to see "Super-Size Me", but it was way too popular, I couldn't get in, but a couple months later I did see his film, and then I met him at San Diego Comic-Con, maybe once again at New York Comic-Con, he came and hung out at our booth.  Then he made a film in 2011 called "Comic-Con Episode IV: A New Hope" and didn't involve us at all, after we were so kind to show him what the event was all about.  I kind of never forgave him for that.  

I don't like to speak ill of the deceased, but I also found out he sort of "cancelled" himself in 2019, after admitting publicly that he'd cheated on all three of his wives and also his girlfriends, and realized that he had some kind of sex addiction problem (or fear of commitment, if you prefer) and was putting himself in semi-retirement.  This is also known as pulling a "Letterman", by coincidence, as David Letterman admitted on his show that he'd been unfaithful to his wife and had sex with both staffers and guests, without naming them of course, and then just a few months later he retired from his big late night CBS show, vanished for a few years, and then came back with a Netflix show.  Both men essentially cancelled themselves before the news media and the public could, and I wish I could say there was a lesson in there somewhere, but I don't think there is.  "Know thyself", as Aristotle once advised, but what do you when you follow that advice and you don't like what you know about yourself?  It's not for me to say. 

I guess I can cross "Super-Size Me 2" and "Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden" off my list, they got skipped in the last few doc blocks, and I don't think either is available anywhere because of Spurlock's bad publicity.  Well, maybe they're both on Tubi or Freevee or something.

Mark Wahlberg carries over again from "Fear". 

THE PLOT: Socially anxious hitman Melvin Smiley, an expert in his lucrative field, goes on a job and falls in love with his kidnapping victim, turning his world upside down. 

AFTER: Look, I understand that terms like "good" and "bad" are very subjective, but this just might be one of the worst films I've ever seen.  But I can't just brush that off, you know I'm going to have to try to explain WHY this is so bad, which can't really explain HOW it got that way, but I can sure take a stab at WHY it just didn't land anything.

First off, Melvin is a hit-man in a gang of four hitmen.  I'm not in the assassin game, so who the hell knows how that all works, but something tells me that it just doesn't work this way.  There are construction crews, road crews, sports teams, but I just don't think there are TEAMS of hit-men for hire.  Assassins are people who work alone, right?  Like Michael Fassbender's character in "The Killer", he gets his orders from a handler, and then he camps out somewhere with a sniper rifle and a scope and he waits for hours or days until he lines up that perfect shot.  But a team of four guys?  Nah, I highly doubt it. 

But OK, let's roll with it for a moment - this team of four hit-men take their orders from a handler named Paris, but then they also do freelance assassin gigs on the side, when they're not working for Paris.  OK, so does that mean they submit a W-9 form instead of a W-2 when they get hired?  There are assassin temp jobs and also assassin permalance jobs?  Are they employees or independent contractors, do we really have to get into this, because then we have to think about whether they can deduct bullets as expenses on their tax returns, or the cost of traveling to another city to kill somebody, I mean, come on, somebody's got to cover that, right? Again, NONE of this is how real professional killers probably work, but since nobody in the audience probably knows that, the screenwriter just felt free to make it all up, right?  

And so then contract killers sometimes call in sick, right?  At the start of the film we see Melvin carrying home a body in a bag, like he's doing a favor for another hit-man and storing his kill over the weekend, because the other guy has a thing, or no place to dispose of a corpse. WHAT?  How is this a likely scenario, let me just carry home a BODY for you in my trunk and hide it, because I'm such a nice guy.  Who would do this, risk getting caught with a body and then be on the hook for another guy's kill, once the smell of decomp reached the neighboring apartment and someone calls the cops?  

So, anyway, the four hit-men take a freelance gig, and it's, like, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?  Well, the job is to kidnap this Japanese teenage girl, and her father is some kind of electronics dealer, but that guy is bankrupt because he lost money trying to produce films (man, I feel that...) and also, the girl's godfather is their part-time handler/boss, Paris!  Damn, what ARE the odds of that?  

On top of all this, Melvin somehow falls in love with the kidnapped girl, which again, is another thing that probably does NOT represent how real hit-man work should go.  Melvin also has two girlfriends that we know about, one African-American one and one Jewish one - I mean, great for him, he's clearly not racist or Anti-semitic, except one of those girlfriends clearly hates him and the other one wants him to have dinner with her parents, and that also goes terribly wrong in ways that aren't even remotely funny, it's mostly just Elliott Gould throwing up on people after drinking alcohol.  

And then that dinner keeps getting interrupted, both by the Japanese girl trying to escape, and also the other assassins trying to crash the party, for no apparent reason.  I guess they've gone back to working for Paris and they're trying to frame Melvin for the kidnapping to save their own skins, but that really doesn't make much sense either.  Nothing here makes much sense, I'll give you that. 

And in the midst of all that, Melvin keeps getting calls from the angry teen who works at a video rental store, because he has not returned the VHS copy of "King Kong Lives", and the late fees are piling up.  Geez, does anybody remember what a hassle it was to rent VHS tapes and then try to remember to return them on time?  Nah, I didn't think so.  SO this film is very outdated on top of everything else, like dating a third girl and being unfaithful to BOTH of your girlfriends is so very 1998, and not cool in any way.  This will now be referred to as "pulling a Spurlock" in my book, but I'd like to think that men as a whole have evolved past this Neanderthal method of dating so many women at once. 

Sure, it's possible to make an action movie that's also a comedy, or at least comic, but it's a very difficult line to walk, and I think maybe it all comes down to comic tone, which is unfortunately what's absent here.  Instead we get car chases and car crashes, exploding video stores and multi-person shootouts, and then it just seems like everybody kind of forgot to be funny?  Because nothing's funny here, absolutely nothing, so really, how hard did they try? 

No movie tonight, so no post tomorrow, because I have to get up early and get back to work at the theater, I've been away for 2 weeks now, and only 9 days of that was because of our trip to North Carolina.  I think the rest was because I didn't update my May work calendar in time and I lost out on some shifts. 

Also starring Lou Diamond Phillips (last seen in "The 33"), Christina Applegate (last seen in "Hall Pass"), Avery Brooks (last seen in "For the Love of Spock"), Bokeem Woodbine (last seen in "Devil"), Antonio Sabato Jr., China Chow (last seen in "Head Over Heels"), Lainie Kazan (last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), Elliott Gould (last seen in "You People"), Sab Shimono (last seen in "Nice Dreams"), Robin Dunne, Lela Rochon (last seen in "Waiting to Exhale"), Danny Smith, Joshua Peace (also last seen in "Devil"), David Usher, Hardee T. Lineham, Gerry Mendicino (last seen in "Little Italy"), Alexa Gilmour, John Stocker (last seen in "The Dream Team"), Cotton Mather, Derrek Peels, Tig Fong (last seen in "The Ladies Man"), Danny Lima (last seen in "Bulletproof Monk"), Giovahann White, Robert Hannah. 

RATING: 2 out of 10 breakdance moves (during a shoot-out? REALLY?)