Pa Robert Succi
| Published
After viewing 2002 Cashan almighty algorithm directed me to other ill-fated heist films from the early days, prompting me to spend 88 minutes of my life watching 2001 movies I wish you were dead. Similar to Cash, I wish you were dead makes you wonder what could have been because all the moving parts are there for a great movie. The heist is fun, and there’s a clear logic to it that any fan of crime comedy thrillers can embrace. There is scheming and scheming, and each character has enough personality to keep you interested in the premise.
The problem with I wish you were deadwhich, unlike Cashis actually trying to be a comedy, is that the actions of the characters do not always match the surroundings. There are jokes and physical comedy, but the humor is too subdued when, in my opinion, things should have been more bawdy. I wish you were dead trying to capture a Very bad things kind of vibe, but it should have taken a page from the Naked Gun playbook.
Is it even true love if there is no insurance fraud?
At face value, I wish you were dead has a fun setup and some great on-screen chemistry that you want it to stick around for. We are first introduced to Melody (Elaine Hendricks), an assassin for hire who likes to eat a lot of chocolate. Her penchant for the sweet reminds me of Rutger Hauer’s Harley Stone from 1992 A secondbut the similarity stops there. Melody’s specialty is taking clients with unfaithful husbands, beating them up, and then moving on to the next job.
Her next job, however, is where things get more complicated.
Melody is recruited by Sally (Mary Steenbergen) and Tanya Ryder (Tanya Allen), a mother-daughter team who hatch a fraud scheme against a no-nonsense insurance adjuster named Mack (Cary Elwes) who has a million dollar life insurance policy. Sally and Tanya’s plan is simple: convince Mack that Sally is pregnant with his child so he can make her the beneficiary of his death benefit, then hire Melody to finish him off.
Things get even more complicated when Melody decides that she really is in love with Mac and can’t in good conscience kill him. Instead, they team up with Mac’s older colleague, Bruce (Christopher Lloyd), and hatch their own plan to evade Sally and Tanya, save Mack’s life, and escape with the money. Along the way, there are skirmishes with Gene Simmons of KISS, who plays an eccentric barber named Vinny, and appearances by Billy Ray Cyrus and Robert Englund, who portray a cocky preacher with Tourette’s syndrome.
Should work, but doesn’t
I wish you were dead completely overflowing with potential, but it never feels fully realized because it’s so disjointed. I have trouble explaining why it’s disjointed because the story beats are solid and the stakes build naturally. Everyone you see on screen has acting skills and knows the assignment, but something about the assignment itself is off.
I might change my mind if I ever rewatch the movie because maybe I was in a bad mood or something when I watched it, but it just didn’t make me laugh. This movie has It’s always sunny in Philadelphia levels of intrigue. Elaine Hendricks’ crazy eyes when she’s madly shooting daggers at Christopher Lloyd should, in theory, be funny. But for some reason it does not gel. Mack is the perfect hapless victim of circumstance, caught between an assassination plot and a budding affair with the man hired to kill him. It’s all funny, but too quirky to be taken seriously, even as a comedy, and too blatant when it should have been a little more solid.
truth be told I wish you were dead it confuses me so much that I want to eventually watch it again and reconsider my position. All the ingredients for a great crime comedy are there, but the film as a whole feels much less than the sum of its parts.
As of this writing, you can stream I wish you were dead free on Tubi.
