Richard Linklater, one of my favorite indie directors, is known for his episodic and conversation-heavy films such as Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Waking Life, Boyhood, and the Sunrise-Sunset trilogy. Hit Man, on the other hand, is more like a Coen Brothers movie: twisty and plot-driven.
Hit Man went directly from a premier at the 80th Venice International Film Festival to Netflix. It did open at a small number of “select” theaters, but the vast majority of viewers will stream it.
Based loosely on a true story, it stars Glen Powell as Gary Johnson, a college professor who also works undercover for the New Orleans police. His superiors persuade him to pose as a hit man to set up people desperate or unhinged enough to hire a contract killer. Things get complicated when he’s “hired” by a woman named Madison (Adria Arjona) who wants to kill her abusive husband. Unlike prior setups, Madison seems like an actual victim with a just cause. It also doesn’t hurt that Gary is instantly attracted to her.
The story is a fairly typical modern noirish-comic tale with quirky characters and twists. Is Madison really a victim or more of a femme fatale with a hidden agenda? Will she discover Johnson’s true identity? To make matters more complicated, Johnson has a rival on the police force, a real cop named Jasper (Austin Amelio), who wanted the fake hit man gig himself. As Johnson gets involved with Madison, Jasper is watching.
One problem I had with Hit Man is how it starts. Gary Johnson narrates and just announces that he’s a philosophy professor with a mostly boring life who just happens to work undercover for the police, as if this is a normal thing. We see how he’s reluctant to take on the hit man role. But, really, that’s a relatively small step compared to the initial stage, which we never see, of getting recruited by the police in the first place. Maybe they didn’t want to lengthen the film by adding exposition, but to me it seems like a big omission.
I don’t tend to watch movies multiple times, but I get so much enjoyment from the verbal exchanges in many Linklater films that I often enjoy revisiting them. Sadly, I can only think of one scene in Hit Man that has this quality: a brief conversation between Gary and his ex-wife Alicia (Molly Bernard), who fall into the kind of profound and completely-inessential-to-the- plot type of conversation found in Waking Life, Before Sunrise, and others. Otherwise, the narration and dialog in Hit Man is either functional or typical flippant movie dialogue.
As played by Powell, Johnson is an enigmatic character who fluctuates between nerdy, charismatic, and unpredictable. From my research, I see he’s been in some popular movies I haven’t seen (I’m basically an all-indie guy). He mostly comes across like a movie star confident that the script has him covered. The role reminds me a bit of Tom Hanks in Catch Me If You Can.
I put Hit Man in the category of an A- or B+ semi-indie/semi-mainstream fils that I enjoy but wouldn’t go out of my way to see again.