Hit Man

Austin, Texas native Richard Linklater has managed to achieve remarkable success as a filmmaker while not compromising his independent views and methods. With a Linklater film you usually get a relaxed comic sensibility combined with intelligent witty dialogue. He doesn’t live near Hollywood, and he has resisted the Hollywood blockbuster mentality, displaying instead a modesty that is satisfied with medium budget films that are well-made, funny and insightful. His latest is called Hit Man, which pokes fun at the absurd “hit man” movie genre. You may recall my review of The Killer last year, a dark satire on a similar theme from David Fincher. Linklater, by contrast, has given us a genial romantic comedy thriller.

Glen Powell plays a philosophy professor in New Orleans named Gary Johnson. He has an air of glib self-assurance that serves him well in a classroom. Gary is an easy-going young fellow, recently divorced, living alone with two cats, and seemingly content. He’s also a tech expert who, for the fun of it, moonlights for the local cops, designing and implementing the surveillance equipment the department uses to catch criminals. One day in the police van when they’re about to do a sting, they find that their undercover guy has been suspended for misconduct. Gary is recruited on the spot to fill in. His job is to go into a restaurant pretending to be a contract killer, and entrap a homicidal idiot into a taped confession. It’s scary, but he agrees to try it. Unexpectedly, the subterfuge stimulates his imagination, and he puts on a very convincing (and funny) imitation of a hit man, which succeeds so well that it leads to a part-time police career for Gary as a fake killer for hire.

The idea for this story was taken from an article in The Texas Monthly about an actual guy who got 70 people busted for conspiracy to commit murder. This basic premise, however, has been whipped up into an outlandish piece of fiction by the co-screenwriters, Linklater and the lead actor, Powell. The scenes where Gary, in various guises and costumes, meets with a series of inept wannabes who try to pay him to kill someone, are hilarious. They all end up in jail. But when he meets one potential client, a beautiful young woman named Madison, played by Adria Arjona, who wants her abusive husband bumped off, he can’t bring himself to entrap her, and instead persuades her not to go through with it, to the chagrin of his handlers.

So overconfident is Gary now, after his success as a cop, that he unwisely pursues a sexual relationship with Madison—not as Gary, but as Ron, his hit man persona, whose aura of danger she finds attractive. Unfortunately, a dirty cop, who used to have Gary’s job, sees them together somewhere and becomes suspicious. Gary now has to maneuver through increasingly insane complications in order not to be exposed.

Meanwhile, his class lectures about the fragility of human identity add counterpoint to his weird evolution as a character. Glen Powell pulls off the difficult feat of making Gary seem both nerdy and bold, and he’s good at riffing on silly action hero conventions. Hit Man is a clever little gizmo of a movie that’s not trying to be deep, just fun.