'Hit Man' Slaps
All pie is good pie.
Hit Man is, as I believe Oscar Wilde might have put it, charming as fuck. It’s not only another feather in director Richard Linklater’s cap, it’s his most mainstream, crowd-pleasing movie since School of Rock way back in 2003. It should convert the five people left in the world who still either don’t know Glen Powell or somehow don’t think he’s a star. And Adria Arjona is so good, I forgive her for inexplicably and repeatedly mispronouncing “Nobel Prize” as “Noble Prize” in Morbius.
I also suspect it will be responsible for an uptick in the pregnancies in the coming months.
Written by Linklater and Powell, who first worked together on 2016’s Everybody Wants Some!!, Hit Man is loosely inspired by the life of Gary Johnson. Around the turn of the century, Johnson worked for the Houston PD posing as a killer-for-hire in order to ensnare hirers-of-killers. Hit Man is a romantic comedy first and a thriller second, so in the movie version, he’s played by Powell as a boring, inhibited New Orleans college professor of philosophy and psychology (the movie’s most fantastical element may be the casting of Powell as an unfuckable square). His side hustle is doing electronics stuff for undercover police sting operations, and one day happenstance forces Gary to step in at the last second and pretend to be a paid assassin. He turns out to be surprisingly good at this job, and is soon doing it on the regular, using make-up, wigs, and costumes to cater each of his fictional murderers to the client’s vision of an archetypal hitman (e.g., for one job he’s a Russian action movie villain, for one job he’s a Redneck Proud Boy-type, for one job he is very clear imitating Christian Bale in American Psycho, etc. - if nothing else, Hit Man shows that Powell has versatility beyond what Hollywood has thus far demanded of him).
A wrinkle arises, however, when an assignment leads him to Madison (Arjona), a beautiful woman who appears earnestly desperate to get away from her abusive, controlling husband. Fortunately, for this particular mission, Gary has chosen the persona of his inner Glen Powell, and there’s an instant chemistry between the two. So while Gary - who Madison thinks is named Ron - manages to talk Madison out of hiring someone to whack her spouse (thus avoiding jail time), he also soon finds himself romantically entangled with her, which is what’s known in police circles as “a conflict of interest.”
Linklater has many talents, not least of which is his mastery of tone, which means that even as Hit Man can perfectly balance its hilarity with its more noirish, suspenseful elements (and make no mistake - funny as Hit Man is, it does include some very tense moments).
One skill that does often seem to elude Linklater, however, is subtext: Hit Man takes full advantage of Gary’s knowledge re: philosophy and psychology to spell out its themes for the audience. The plot pauses more than once to visit Gary’s classes, where he just so happens to be discussing the subject of self, and how malleable the self may or may not be. Gary becomes acutely aware that his students and co-workers (including Parks and Rec’s Retta and The Walking Dead’s Austin Amelio) would rather hang out with Ron than they would with Gary; furthermore, he clearly enjoys being Ron (if not just being an assortment of different people altogether). Implicit is the concern that lying isn’t the strongest way to start off a lasting romantic relationship, and that Madison might not like the real Gary. Protagonists pretending to be someone they’re not is a trope as old as the romantic comedy itself, but for whatever reason, others have never thought to name-drop Nietzsche into these breezy stories.
Interestingly, what Linklater does leave unsaid is the reason that Madison falls for Gary (er, Ron): whereas her husband will barely permit her to leave the house, Gary/Ron doesn’t just allow her to have freedom, but insists on it (under the auspices of being a criminal, but really to avoid being found out). Less subtly, he also has Madison’s back in a way her husband never does. Point being, it does feel like there’s a reason for these two to fall in love besides the fact that they’re both freakishly attractive.
The fact is, the chemistry between Powell and Arjona is its own special effect, and one far more enthralling than any car crash or CGI monkey; the sex scenes here aren’t exactly explicit, but they still generate sweltering heat (thus my prediction that this movie will be directly responsible for an abundance of procreation). Audiences are allegedly clamoring for Powell and Sydney Sweeney to follow up the abysmal Anyone But You, but it’s impossible to imagine anyone seeing Hit Man and not demanding that Powell make at least 700 more movies with Arjona. I suspect the outtakes of these two from Hit Man are a billion times more entertaining than the entirety of Anyone But You.
Hit Man is only getting a limited theatrical release before landing on Netflix, and that’s kind of a bummer; I suspect that, under the right conditions, this movie would be just as big of a hit as the aforementioned Powell/Sweeney vehicle, which the industry could desperately use right now. Hit Man will just have to settle for being a total blast.