Review - Hit Man
Richard Linklater's dark screwball comedy is a good time, but lacks the bite to become a truly great time.
Last Friday, Netflix released Richard Linklater’s Hit Man in the United States. If you haven’t been able to watch it, give it a chance before reading this, as I lightly spoil the film’s central plot and themes.
Suffice to say, I was mixed on it: I liked a lot of things from it (mainly Glen Powell), but others, not so much. Even so, this film has gotten great reviews from all around, with some critics I truly respect raving and claiming this film as the best American production of 2024. If you want to read a more positive review, consider reading my dear friend eduardo’s review from yesterday.
Identity as Theft: Richard Linklater’s Hit Man
Production from the United States. Released in 2024.
I’ve already written about some of Richard Linklater’s films in the past, and the beauty that they convey in their naturalism. Throughout the Before trilogy, Jesse and Celine did not follow a plot but rather exist within their own inner and outer worlds. In Boyhood, Mason grew up just as anyone else would. These four films weaponize their own naturalism to make very specific stories seem universal and identifiable for anyone perceiving them. It’s quite the accomplishment, and despite varying his style from time to time, Linklater’s films generally shared that sense of naturalism and day-in-the-life quality, with Dazed and Confused, and Everybody Wants Some!! being other notable examples. Going into his new film Hit Man, I knew in a way that it would not follow this same natural style, it seemed too high concept to even be compatible. And though there are good things to find in this dark comedy romp, it leans more into screwball comedy territory and lacks the sharp teeth to have anything more meaningful to say, other than a fun psychological exercise.
Hit Man stars and is co-written by a charming Glen Powell -the star of Anyone But You and also featured as the douchebag in Top Gun: Maverick- as Gary Johnson, a psychology and philosophy professor at a local college who does part time work for the New Orleans Police Department and is eventually hired to impersonate hit men to entrap, incarcerate and convict people who try to solicit hitman services. He’s very good at it and goes about it for a while until he meets Madison (Adria Arjona) who, in a moment of vulnerability, sees killing her husband as the only way out of her awful and abusive marriage. Instead of entrapping her, he talks her out of it and eventually they begin a relationship. The thing is: she never knows Gary is a fake; for her, he is Ron, the contract killer. Thus begins this twisty tale involving tons of sex, comedy, dark twists and an almost banger of an ending.
First, the things I liked. Glen Powell is amazing, and part of it, I think, lies in his participation in the film’s inception. His whole deal is an ode to acting, the power of performance and its fakery. Maybe Linklater and Powell watched Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy before making this film, because both say some of the same things while this one is more toned down in its philosophical quests while being more overtly commercial. He becomes a tattooed MAGA American, a Patrick Bateman type, a Tilda Swinton in The Killer type, a Russian mobster type, the list goes on, and while all the impersonations are surface level, his performance within a performance as Ron goes beyond just that.
With its seamless sense of pacing, Powell’s gradual shift from being fully Gary to adopting Ron as an essential element of his personality is insane based off of his acting skill alone. What takes him down? The script incessantly needs to remind us of those changes, with people noting how Gary is boring and too lame in the beginning, and awesome and hotter as the film progresses. An important element of that evolution is the amazing chemistry between Adria Arjona and Glen Powell. Their mutual attraction is palpable and is what makes Gary’s macho persona as Ron more and more believable. Their chemistry is so good, that Linklater relies on it alone for a banger of a scene near the ending where both go all out in a screwball screaming match that is as funny as it is stress-inducing. Her performance alone is also good, she sort of becomes the sexy ditzy girlfriend and the femme fatale at the same time, which makes her more unknowable than she is sinister, but perhaps the film failed in exploring this darkness further.
Onto that point, Hit Man had many choices regarding which themes to focus on, from the power of change in identity and its psychological implications, the inherent problems with coercion as a form of criminal implication, the need for criminal punishment in any context, pop culture’s obsession with contract killers, etc. While it parses through all of these themes in some form or another, it eventually settles for the former. By fully embracing Certified Copy in a more mainstream fashion, Linklater argues for a world full of possibility through the art of fakery, arguing through academics and action that a person’s identity is nothing but a set of external characteristics that can become malleable for that person’s gain. However, the many zones of immorality Gary has to go through to his eventual endpoint makes this self-help messaging less clear-cut.
One of the things that bothers me is that Gary never faces any true danger and is able to upend any situation he finds himself in. He also never suffers the consequences of his action, and neither does Madison who, as I said, seems to be a little darker than originally shown. And to be clear, they don’t need to be held accountable for some moral reasons, as film doesn’t need to signal morals for it to have any artistic value. However, in defying the chance for accountability or any form of complication, Hit Man fails to go somewhere deeper and more meaningful to examine this idea of a changing identity and what it can do. Its oversimplification makes it a crowd pleaser, but not much else.
The true moments of challenge I found were the courtroom scenes where Gary attended as a spectator, and where the defendants’ lawyers took their chance to convince the jury that the entire police conceit of tricking vulnerable people into implicating themselves has its own set of moral pitfalls. Gary even realizes this as he lets Madison off the hook, more because of her charm and their chemistry than anything else. But then when he is questioned as a witness, he uses his Ron identity to double down in his self-justification, it is an almost compartmentalization of a police state ruse that serves him at his convenience. Again, maybe it’s not the film Linklater and Powell sought out to make, but maybe it was the ultimately more interesting one?
Despite it being clearly entertaining and a breezy two hours, Hit Man falls short of going further in its exploration of identity as a form of self-improvement or a form of coercion by trying to have it both ways in its dark and screwball tonalities. The best part of the film is a sexy embrace while something horrible happens in the background. THAT is what this dark comedy needed to have more bite. And instead of ending on that darkly comic note, the film flashed forward in time in an ultimate act of condoning the central characters. They are free, redeemed, and they became good people? Are they? Can they truly?