By Robert Scucci
| Published 4 seconds ago
After watching 2002’s Hard Cash, the almighty algorithm guided me to other ill-fated heist movies from the early aughts, prompting me to spend 88 minutes of my life watching 2001’s Wish You Were Dead. Similar to Hard Cash, Wish You Were Dead makes you wonder what could have been, because all the moving parts are there for a great film. The heist is fun, and there’s a clear logical progression that any crime comedy thriller fan can get behind. There’s scheming and plotting, and each character has enough personality quirks to keep you interested in the premise.
The problem with Wish You Were Dead, which, unlike Hard Cash, is actually trying to be a comedy, is that the characters’ actions don’t always line up with their surroundings. The jokes and physical comedy are there, but the humor leans too lowbrow when, in my opinion, things should have been more deadpan. Wish You Were Dead is 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’s No Insurance Fraud?
At face value, Wish You Were Dead has a hilarious setup and some great on-screen chemistry that makes you wish it stuck the landing. We’re first introduced to Melody (Elaine Hendrix), a man-murdering hit woman who loves eating copious amounts of chocolate. Her penchant for sweets reminds me of Rutger Hauer’s Harley Stone from 1992’s Split Second, but the similarities stop there. Melody’s specialty is taking on clients with unfaithful husbands, whacking them, and then moving on to the next job.
Her next job, however, is where things become complicated.
Melody is hired by Sally (Mary Steenburgen) and Tanya Rider (Tanya Allen), a mother-and-daughter team hatching a scheme to commit fraud against a lowly insurance adjuster named Mac (Cary Elwes), who has a million-dollar life insurance policy in his name. Sally and Tanya’s plan is simple: convince Mac that Sally is pregnant with his child so he’ll make her the beneficiary of his post-mortem payout, then hire Melody to finish him off.
Matters get even more complicated when Melody decides she’s actually in love with Mac and can’t, in good conscience, kill him. Instead, they team up with Mac’s older co-worker, Bruce (Christopher Lloyd), and hatch their own plan to evade Sally and Tanya, save Mac’s life, and run off with the money. Along the way, there are run-ins with Gene Simmons from KISS, who plays an eccentric hairdresser named Vinny, along with appearances from Billy Ray Cyrus and Robert Englund portraying a sassy preacher with Tourette syndrome.
Should Work But Doesn’t
Wish You Were Dead is absolutely dripping with potential, but it never feels fully realized because it’s so disjointed. I’m having trouble explaining why it’s disjointed, because the story beats are solid, and the escalating stakes ramp up naturally. Everybody you see on screen has acting chops and knows the assignment, but something about the assignment itself doesn’t work.
I may change my mind if I ever rewatch the film, because maybe I was just in a bad mood or something when I watched it, but it simply did not make me laugh. This movie has It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia levels of scheming. Elaine Hendrix’s crazy eyes when she’s mad, shooting daggers at Christopher Lloyd, should, in theory, be funny. But for some reason, it doesn’t gel. Mac is the perfect hapless victim of circumstance, caught between a murder plot and a budding romance with the person who was hired to kill him. This is all funny stuff, but it’s too quirky to be taken seriously, even as a comedy, and too overtly campy when it should have been just a little more deadpan.
Truth be told, Wish You Were Dead confuses me enough that I want to eventually watch it again and reassess my stance. All the ingredients for a superb crime comedy are there, but as a whole, the movie feels far less than the sum of its parts.
As of this writing, you can stream Wish You Were Dead for free on Tubi.
