Given the time and effort many artists put into standing out from the crowd, it’s been fascinating to watch rising star Glen Powell turn his personal brand into “indistinct.” After his charismatic turn in Top Gun: Maverick, Powell pivots to Hit Man — which Powell co-wrote with director Richard Linklater — playing a college professor whose bland anonymity makes him a perfect chameleon to run sting operations for the police.
Powell’s Gary Johnson is a divorced philosophy professor who leads a quiet life in New Orleans with his cats and his birds, and his proficiency with electronics scores him a side gig planting hidden mics and cameras for the NOPD. Gary’s devices catch people in the act of hiring a paid assassin, but as he mentions in the narration, hit men don’t really exist. The people desperate enough to seek out a hired gun find themselves talking to undercover cops, who bust them for soliciting a hit.
Before one such sting, roundly-disliked officer Jasper (Austin Amelio) gets suspended for beating up some teens (and getting caught on camera), so Gary is pressed into service at the last minute to play the phony killer. And much to the surprise of colleagues Claudette (Retta) and Phil (Sanjay Rao), Gary’s great at it, improvising in the moment, throwing in ludicrous details about body disposal, and doing and saying all the right things to make the suspect incriminate himself.
In his philosophy lectures, Gary talks a lot about the self and the potential people have to change, and as he becomes the central figure in these stings, he becomes a chameleon, taking on different personalities and wearing different costumes to be the right kind of killer for a wide range of people, from a skeet-shooting good-ol’-boy to a wealthy matron who would rather murder than divorce her husband so that she can keep their house.
One of the stings puts Gary face to face with Madison (Adria Arjona), a traumatized wife who sees hiring someone to kill her abusive spouse as her only way out of a bad situation. Gary, in the guise of the suave “Ron,” is touched by her plight, and rather than entrap her, he advises her to leave and to create a life for herself. The situation gets complicated when Madison falls for “Ron,” and the two start having a no-strings-attached affair; she clearly gets off on what she perceives as Ron’s life of danger and mystery, and Gary is at least a little intrigued to be with a woman who was willing to have her husband killed.
Hit Man operates in the comic true-crime mode of Linklater’s great Bernie — although the setting is New Orleans and not the auteur’s usual homebase of Texas — and the sequences where Gary goes undercover and nails the would-be employers of his various lethal characters are consistently hilarious. Powell shows off his shape-shifting skills, and he and Arjona have scorching chemistry, which the film requires for some dark turns in the final third.
The movie makes viewers complicit with Madison and Gary/Ron’s relationship, so much so that we are expected to follow them as they commit morally questionable acts. That leap is all well and good, and of a piece with the rest of the film, but in the closing titles, Linklater shows us pictures of the real Gary Johnson and reveals too much about the fork in the road between fact and fiction and what filmmakers choose to do with both.
Powell and Linklater would have done better to take Johnson’s story as a launching point and then spun off into their far more complicated version of his life without literally tethering the movie to a real person. Whichever distributor scoops up the film after its Venice premiere might consider changing the opening and closing references to Johnson, since they serve mainly to muddy the water.
That said, Hit Man is an amiably shaggy Linklater comedy — his Fletch, perhaps — from start to finish, with no shortage of quotable lines and memorable characters. (Retta doesn’t get nearly enough to do, but she wrings every drop of comedy from the lines she’s been given.) It’s also a welcome respite amid a landscape of movies, comics, and videogames that insist that hired assassins are lurking behind every bush. They just aren’t.
Director: Richard Linklater
Screenwriter: Richard Linklater & Glen Powell, based on the Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth
Cast: Glen Powell, Adria Arjona, Austin Amelio, Retta, Sanjay Rao, Molly Bernard, Evan Holtzman
Producers: Mike Blizzard, Richard Linklater, Glen Powell, Jason Bateman, Michael Costigan
Executive producers: Stuart Ford, Zach Garrett, Miguel A. Palos Jr., Shivani Rawat, Julie Goldstein, Vicky Patel, Steve Barnett, Alan Powell, John Sloss, Scott Brown, Megan Creydt
Director of photography: Shane F. Kelly
Production design: Bruce Curtis
Costume design: Julianna Hoffpauir
Editing: Sandra Adair
Music: Graham Reynolds
Sound: Justin Hennard, sound designer
Production companies: Agc Studios, Shivhans Pictures, Monarch Media, Barnstorm Co., Aggregate Films, Cinetic Media, Detour Filmproduction
In English
113 minutes
