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The Hero is fighting against the Giant Mook. He might be slow, but he sure is strong and doesn't seem to even notice the hero's blows. The hero can fight him off for so long, staying out of his clutches, but before too long, the Big Guy has hold of him. He's so strong and powerful that this must surely be the end for our hero. He'll surely just snap the hero like a twig, or crush the life out of him, or just hold him still with one hand and punch the hero's head right off his shoulders, he'll surely...
Oh, no, he's thrown the hero across the room and through that glass window. Looks impressive and I'm sure it hurt but the hero is getting up again. No it's ok, the Big Guy is very slowly chasing again. OK, he's got the hero again, now it's time for the kiling blow, just twist his head off like a bottle top....
Nope, he's holding the hero up in the air by the throat with one hand, wow this guy is strong... strange that he doesn't make better use of... oh, and now the hero has kicked him in the junk, you would have thought the Big Guy would see that coming. Well, he's gonna be real mad now, this has to be the end, he's just gonna punch his fist right through the hero's ribcage and that will be....
Nope, he's thrown the hero again. Right through a wall, so he must have thrown him pretty hard. Oh but he's thrown the hero right next to that "Conveniently Placed Weapon ™" and now he's in trouble. C'mon, big guy, stop messing around and Just Hit Him!!
Also popular with superpowered villains with telekinetic powers. Despite their godlike powers, they always seem to fall back on the old 'lift the hero up in the air with the power of my mind and then toss him gently against that wall' stratagem.
This is the less sophisticated cousin of Why Dont Ya Just Shoot Him.
Examples:
- Terminator Salvation has two separate fights involving an unarmed Terminator fighting John Connor, and despite being a killer robot with extensive knowledge of human anatomy, repeatedly throws Connor far away and thus giving him the time to pull out a weapon.
- One of them has no legs, thus making throwing him doubly stupid.
- Jaws from the James Bond films The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker and the game Everything or Nothing is fond of this tactic.
- The Russian hitman from The Punisher was also an offender.
- The two hitmen sent to kill Jackie Chan in First Strike (aka Police Story 4) decide they want to 'have some fun' with Jackie before they kill him. And how do burly Russian hitmen have fun? Throwing people across the room!
- In fact, a lot of the bad guys in Jackie Chan films have 'throwing people across the room' as a hobby.
- "Super Shredder," the mutated form of Shredder in TMNT 2: The Secret of the Ooze, becomes a victim and casualty of the Just Hit Him phenomenon, going so far as to cause his own undoing because of it.
- Slightly subverted in the Subway Showdown in The Matrix, in which Smith throws Neo across the room a lot, but also pins Neo to the wall and punches him silly.
- Much like Deadly Dodging on Spidey's part, Just Hit Him was thoroughly exercised by various supervillains and superheroes alike on Spider Man The Animated Series due to the fact that the suits didn't allow anyone to throw punches. Try to imagine the otherwise Bad Ass Kingpin or Venom being limited to picking up Spidey, then lightly dropping him again and proceeding to pronounce how invincible and deadly they truly are.
- To be fair, Kingpin was known for handing out spine-crunching bear hugs to his opponents. So, hitting is bad but crushing people half with bare hands is okay?
- The reason punching is left out is because it's an imitatable action that can and will cause harm. However, if your kids start hugging each other...
- Despite this handicap, Venom was still scary as hell.
- In Constantine when John confronts the demon Balthazar, he's held up against the wall by his neck and slowly choked, giving John plenty of time to reach into his jacket pocket and pull out his holy-knuckle-dusters.
- The telekinetic version of this is averted in Elfen Lied, where it would take a miracle to stop Lucy from just snapping your head off from the get-go.
- In Suzumiya Haruhi, Ryouko decides to kill Kyon to see how Haruhi will react. She can apparently control everything in the area she's in, but she decides to just seal him in the room and summon a knife instead of, I don't know, blowing his head up. I'm sure that would get a big reaction from Haruhi.
- She was just having fun! You wouldn't deny her that, would you? ^_^
- Fan Wank time! She wanted to see how Haruhi would respond to Kyon's death, not how she would respond to the advent of clear supernatural involvement in his murder. Thus, a "mundane" knife-murder was better for the part. When it came to fighting Yuki, it wasn't about Haruhi's responses at all - it was just about fighting to win so she could get back to her job.
- she could have used a gun to kill him too, you know.
- Guns are illegal in Japan. That would only raise further questions.
- Not to any sort of common sense. Since guns are illegal, only criminals have them. So it'd naturally be assumed that a random criminal killed him.
- Right because a random criminal breaking into a school just to shoot a perfectly normal boy makes perfect sense. A knife might be written off as an angry classmate, a gun wouldn't.
- In Star Trek, Captain Kirk once fought an alien lizard that successfully caught him in a snare, pinning him under a rock. With Kirk totally helpless, the alien bizarrely decides to lift the rock and then try stabbing him, giving Kirk the opportunity to escape.
- Supernatural is pretty bad about the telekinetic version of this. Demons have repeatedly slammed them against walls and have demonstrated their ability to slice you open with the ability, but always seem to cause superficial wounds while taunting until they lose their advantage. You'd think they'd know better by now.
- Indiana Jones. Particularly egregious in the second movie- where the slave-driving Giant Mook fails to take advatange of Indy's frequent and painful immobilization via knife to Voodoo Doll.
- In Hot Fuzz both fights involving Giant Mook Michael Armstrong are prominent examples of this.
- Averted by Gregor Clegane in A Storm of Swords. Once he gets a hold of Oberyn Martell, he crushes his skull. Gregor was pinned to the ground with a spear at the time, so he wasn't in much of a position to toss him around.
- Mewtwo from the first Pokemon movie is the psychic version of this. Ash running towards him ready to sock him? Just levitate and launch into the nearby stone tower! That doesn't exactly work, however...
- May be justified by Mewtwo being so ridiculously powerful that he doesn't consider Ash worth the effort of turning him into a fine red mist (think shooing away a fly instead of swatting it).
- Boss monsters in Buffy The Vampire Slayer tend to throw Buffy or her friends into walls instead just ripping their heads off. (Adam comes to mind. Also the goddess Glory, and The Judge, and the Turok-Han uber-vampires, and...) No matter what superpowers or magic spells the bad guys have, or if they're technically immune to damage, the final fight boils down to a martial arts duel between them and Buffy. Buffy is occasionally allowed to use a special weapon (like the rocket launcher used to kill the demon called The Judge), provided that weapon is the only way she can hurt the Big Bad.
- For that matter, Buffy herself spends a lot of time throwing mooks around and punching them to no particular effect, since most of her enemies can only be killed in fairly specific ways. This troper was often tempted to yell, "Just Stake Him!"
- As above, walls and convienently placed pils of cardboard boxes or dumpsters full of soft, soft trash. Mostly the more human Scoobies landed in the latter, as it is canon that Buffy is very durable.
- The superpowered serial killer Sylar from Heroes both plays it straight and subverts the trope: His signature move is to cut open the skulls of his victims, using his telekinesis like an invisible power saw. But at other times (when his opponent is a main character who is supposed to survive), despite the fact that Sylar's telekinesis is strong enough to flip over a driving truck, he uses it simply to hold his opponent up in the air or to fling them into walls instead of breaking their neck.
- Justified most of the time in that Sylar needs live victims. Snapping their necks would be counterproductive.
- Also averted to hell and back by Knox in the same series. He's a villain, made super-strong by other peoples' fear. Sounds like the standard guy to receive this treatment, right? No. He does just hit you, and his whole fist goes right through and out the other side, ribcage or no ribcage. You want to survive an encounter with powered-up Knox, here's a hint for you: don't let him punch you. Hell, the one time he did do this, he ended up killing future-Sylar's son.
- The psychic version appears on a massive scale in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: The Anti-spirals are able to warp across the universe and summon a mecha the size of a galaxy, but decide to elimate the humans by making the moon crash into the Earth over the course of several days, and even alert the people to this.
- Somewhat justifiable due to their methodology — the Anti Spirals' routine is to kill through the Hope Spot, and the Colony Drop scenario had some escape hatches (that the anti-spirals had mostly welded shut, Simon notwithstanding.)
- Heroic example in Penguin Musume Heart has the title character gigantic and naked, and her opponent slightly bigger than usual and naked (or she just lost her clothes and was no bigger.) Title character proceeds to scream "how cute" and rubs her opponent against her face. Opponent goes on to bite her way out of the title characters' grip and jump away. And then they argue over the Power Of Love, which results in said opponent eventually becoming gigantic too. Then again, Penguin's kinda dumb so oh well.
- Gaara's fight with Rock Lee during the Chunin exams in Naruto is rife with this, although it's justifiable by claiming that Gaara wasn't taking Lee very seriously and just toying with him for half the fight. When he finally gets a grip after taking him seriously, his first act is to pulverize Lee's limbs.
- Similarly completely averted when he's fighting Deidara, as he sends his sand flying right towards him and rips off his arm the second he touches him.
- Charmed had a lot of this, even when they had the in-canon power explanation of Leo being able to heal who needed it. -Partly- explained in the typical bad-guy fight involved energy being shot around like gunfire.
- The movie Sidehackers has a baffling good guy example. Upon infiltrating the villain's camp, the big guy, Big Jake stealths his way over to one guard and silently snaps his neck. So far, so good. He then tries to do the same thing to another guard but the guard notices him. Big Jake runs over and instead of killing the mook before he can make too much noise, inexplicably grabs him by the lapels and holds him up against the wall, while he sets off enough of a holler to attract another mook who fills Big Jake with buckshot.
- The psychic version if frequently averted in Darker Than Black. For example, a Contractor with the ability to switch two object via teleportation kills someone by switching their heart for a rock, another one can teleport whatever is covered by his blood so he just splatters it on people and rips them apart, and another that can freeze any water he touches will just freeze the water in your body and kill you or impale you with an icicle (he even has a partner that can cover the area in water, letting him do it from a distance).
- Lampshaded in The Princess Bride (the movie if not the book). Fezzik doesn't want to kill Westley right away because he hates for people to die embarrassed. When he's actually fighting, he does seem to try to do damage, but is just too slow.
- Both played straight and subverted in Haunting Ground. Debilitas will slap, toss, bearhug, and generally make your life miserable, so long as you aren't all the way into Panic Mode. Then he just hops on top of you and punches you to death.
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