Hit Man

Glen Powell

This review contains spoilers...

Richard Linklater's Hit Man is a moderately entertaining film that left an unsatisfying aftertaste for me. The film, written by Linklater and its star Glen Powell, is loosely based on the real life exploits of one Gary Johnson, a New Orleans based philosophy professor who moonlighted as a fake hit man in stings concocted by the local constabulary. The first third of the film works the best as Powell gets to display his acting chops as Johnson dons different guises suited to each individual prospective client. Interwoven with this, we get to see Johnson lecture his classes on the malleability of individual identity, offering us a meta commentary on one of the film's themes. The incisive character vignettes and the pungent local color play to Linklater's strengths, best displayed in another study of Southern criminality, one of Linklater's masterpieces, Bernie.

However, the film changes tack with the introduction of Gary's love interest, played by Adria Arjona, Maddy. Maddy wants to hire Ron, Gary's swaggering hit man guise, to bump off her abusive fiancée. Gary dissuades her, temporarily, and the duo soon act upon their mutual attraction. Since Maddy has fallen for the virile Ron, as opposed to the mild-mannered Gary, we are viewing identity as a construct in action. The element of fantasy is the central aspect to Gary and Maddy's relationship. Their trysts primarily consist of sexual cosplay. Arjona and Powell are talented and attractive, but it is hard for the audience to emotionally invest in characters that seem divorced from Linklater's realistic framework.

Another problem I had with the film is that the supporting characters of Gary's police squad are uninteresting compared to the future felons seeking to hire Gary. As the film shifts its focus to the central romance, we leave behind the colorful murder for hire miscreants and are left with a police team of under sketched minions. The exception is Austin Amelio who gives the film's best performance as Jasper, a corrupt and venal cop. Amelio's skeevy performance grounds the film with a reality that is for the most part absent. When Jasper learns that Gary and Maddy are in cahoots and that Maddy has murdered her fiancee, he attempts to blackmail the duo. They respond by drugging and murdering Jasper.

This action is knowingly counterpointed with a sequence of Gary lecturing his class on moral relativism. I'm no moral absolutist, but this seems to me an overly tidy approach to bumping off (another) villain and offering a happy ending for the lead romantic duo. The film ends with Gary and Maddy in domestic bliss with a to die for house and two cherubic children. The implication is that the ends justify the means, but I don't think so. Perhaps I am expecting too much from a film that ultimately is a light entertainment, a lark. However, Linklater and Powell have introduced a number of interesting themes that they fail to come to grips with. Hit Man offers us, early on, a close-up of the contents of Gary's bookcase. Like the weighty themes, these tomes are merely a tease. Whatever pretensions the film has are discarded for a conclusion that is purely a fairy tale ending, they all lived happily ever after, designed to signal that it is time for children to enter dreamland.