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Richard Linklater has long been one of the most versatile filmmakers in the industry. While he does prefer a specific lane — hangout comedies like Dazed and Confused, Slacker, and SubUrbia — the writer-director has found an equally strong voice with other types of films as well, regardless of financial success. Consider the straightforward comedy School of Rock, the ambitious concept drama Boyhood, or an unprecedented trilogy of romance flicks with the Before series — just to name a few. And now the filmmaker can add dark romcom to the list.
Hit Man focuses on a geeky college philosophy professor, Gary Johnson (Glen Powell), as he moonlights with the New Orleans Police Department as a tech specialist for undercover sting operations. Demure and lacking passion, his life changes one day after he’s tasked with filling in for the undercover agent who actually goes into the field. Now, he must pose as a hit man to coerce people into admitting that they’re planning to have someone killed.
via YouTubeTaking the challenge head-on, Gary is surprisingly good at the job and goes above and beyond the call of duty, researching each of his marks and becoming new characters entirely based on who he’s meeting. Among the rogues’ gallery of personas are a stereotypical Russian villain, a hardened cool kid with neck tattoos and a beanie, a smarmy businessman like Christian Bale in American Psycho, and a skeet-shooting country boy.
Linklater has been championing Powell ever since casting him in a minor role in his 2006 mockumentary Fast Food Nation. Since then, the actor has starred in numerous films, including a couple from Linklater himself. Things changed with the massive success of Top Gun: Maverick back in 2022, in which Powell played a supporting role. He’s now experiencing life as a leading man and it looks good on him.
Linklater knows what he’s got here with Powell — who also co-writes the script with the director — and keeps going back to that well of aliases, sprinkling in Gary’s caricatures even when the plot no longer requires them and showcasing the actor’s talents. Almost as if the director is saying, “Yeah, I found him first.”
The premise we have thus far is enough to sustain a movie but, like an onion, Hit Man continues to peel back layers and evolve, pretty much all the way up to the very end. Upon researching his next suspect/victim, Gary discovers that he’s attracted to her and creates his most appealing version of himself, Ron, who becomes his alter-ego. The client is Madison (Adria Arjona), a distressed wife who wants to kill her apparently abusive husband. However, Gary/Ron, trying to save her from jail time, offers some heartfelt advice that gets her out of her current situation. He then breaks protocol by commencing a fairly serious relationship with the woman.
Gary is able to divorce his various personas from his real life with ease until he finally creates somebody that he actually wants to be. Madison thinks Ron is real and cool and edgy, yet loves how secretive he is. It helps that Powell and Arjona have major chemistry that allows the film to dip into the erotic thriller genre at times.
Despite sampling various thematic elements, Hit Man actually benefits from its lack of genre. It’s one thing to confuse an audience with a discordance of genre conventions but Linklater never relies on a specific style to engage his audience. By the end of the first act, we’re no longer looking for anything specific and are able to take the movie at face value.
Linklater’s films have often been captivating or even fascinating enough that I’m leaning forward in my seat quite a lot, but I can’t think of one that’s been this riveting. There were several times in Hit Man where I realized I hadn’t relaxed my eyebrows for long stretches. And what’s most impressive is the director never evokes this excitement through hyper-stylized filmmaking.
Hit Man features essentially zero action and yet you almost forget that it’s not an action film. A lesser director would’ve used the camera’s movement as a crutch but instead, Linklater keeps things relatively slow-moving, finding tension almost exclusively from his and Powell’s script. Fortunately, they have some influences to lean on, with some connective tissue with 1981’s Body Heat and 1944’s Double Indemnity, the noir that loosely inspired it. Yet, Hit Man doesn’t exploit either of these; this still feels fresh, just as Body Heat felt like a completely new take on its own progenitor.
It might be easy to write off Hit Man as just another popcorn character thriller but there’s so much richness and depth to the experience that truly sets this apart from even its closest comparisons. Supplementing the phenomenal storyboard is the smart script underneath which actually tries to say something. It tethers Gary’s situation to the idea of id and superego, and how the balance between the two dictates Gary’s behavior over the course of the film. And how Gary’s newfound sense of passion changes that balance. The ties between these motifs and the plot is refreshingly loose, that is, until the very end when their relationship becomes too symbiotic.
At the risk of giving too much away — spoiler alert if you haven’t seen it — I don’t love the happy ending we get. I longed for the dark denouement of Body Heat, or even the defeated surrender at the climax of Double Indemnity. Instead, the messy yarn is simply tied up in a bow, sort of. Despite allowing his protagonist to ride off into the sunset, Linklater does so after making him commit a heinous sin, thus putting the audience in an awkward position. Do we want to see Gary get away with it? Or do we want him to be happy? Even Bonnie and Clyde’s motives are more sympathetic than this. Gary gives a long speech to his class during the epilogue, where he explains that he no longer believes in moral absolutes. But this totally contradicts what we’re feeling by this point.
Perhaps the choice for optimism was made because of the film’s pretense as a true story (drawn from a 2001 article in Texas Monthly about the real-life Gary Johnson). As if to show Gary’s comeuppance would be to dishonor the real-life Gary in some way. Suddenly, the deceptively dark, nihilistic plot transforms into, “The world is your oyster!” And Gary seems to be drawing causation between the willingness to change and a lack of moral inhibition.
On the other hand, one could also view this ending as a satire of sorts; an indictment on this way of thinking. Linklater is a wise enough filmmaker to know that we love Gary because he’s a good guy — not a killer. And after all, we never actually see Madison’s husband doing anything that she claims he’s doing. She’s established as an unreliable character early on, which never truly gets debunked. Was she taking a note from Kathleen Turner in Body Heat and lying about her husband’s life insurance policy?
Was she just trying to corrupt Gary into making him more like Ron? Perhaps I just liked this movie too much not to think that the ending was a sort of moral dilemma posed for the audience rather than justification for evil. Regardless of the poor choice for an ending, Hit Man (admittedly, they could have chosen a better name) showcases adroit storytelling ability and is more evidence of Linklater’s infinite range as a filmmaker – and Powell’s future as a movie star.