As the film opens, we meet four buddies working out in a health club. They're played by Mark Wahlberg (of “Boogie Nights”), Lou Diamond Phillips, Bokeem Woodbine and Antonio Sabato Jr. The guys are hunks with big muscles, which we can study during a locker room scene where they stand around bare-bottomed while discussing Woodbine's recent discovery of masturbation, which he recommends as superior to intercourse, perhaps because it requires only one consenting adult.

Then they dress for work. They're all garbed as utility workers, with hard hats, toolboxes and wide leather belts holding wrenches and flashlights. As they saunter down the street to Graeme Revell's pumping soundtrack, they look like a downsized road company version of the Village People.

The plot: They attack the heavily defended high-rise stronghold of a rich pimp who has just purchased three new girls for $50,000 a head. They break in with guns blazing, and there's an extended action sequence ending with one of the heroes diving out of an upper floor on a bungee cord, just ahead of a shattering explosion. And so on.

They kidnap Keiko (China Chow), the daughter of a rich Japanese executive. Complications ensue, and she ends up in the hands, and later the car trunk, of the leader of the hit men, named Melvin Smiley (Wahlberg). This is most likely the first movie in which the hero hit man is named Melvin Smiley. But he does smile a lot, because his weakness is, “I can't stand the idea of people who don't like me.” You would think a hit man would have a lot of people walking around not liking him, but not if he is a good enough shot.

Keiko falls in love with Melvin with astonishing rapidity. Sure, she tries to escape, but by the end she realizes her future lies with his. Will this complicate Melvin's life? Not any more than it already is.

He has a black mistress (Lela Rochon), who looks at a dismembered body in their bathtub and says, “He's kinda cute.” And he has a Jewish fiancee (Christina Applegate), who is Jewish for the sole purpose of having two Jewish parents (so they can appear in the middle of the movie like refugees from a Woody Allen picture and provide crudely stereotyped caricatures). Gould makes crass remarks about his wife's plastic surgery, gets drunk and throws up on Lou Diamond Phillips, in a scene where both actors appear to be using the powers of visualization to imagine themselves elsewhere.

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