NATHAN WEINBENDER:
Richard Linklater has always straddled the line between indie darling and major studio director. That journeyman duality is what makes him one of the most unassumingly brilliant American filmmakers, and it also ties into the themes of competing identities in his new comedy Hit Man, which is as close a movie about contract killing can come to being a breezy crowd pleaser.
Linklater co-wrote the script with his star, Glen Powell, and based it loosely on a 2001 article by Skip Hollandsworth, whose work previously inspired Linklater’s 2011 film Bernie. Powell plays Gary Johnson, an unassuming philosophy professor who lives alone with his cats and who just so happens to moonlight as an undercover operative for the cops. His expertise is sting operations, posing as a murderer for hire and getting a bunch of poor saps to admit on tape that yes, they for sure want him to accept this payment and snuff out this person whose death would benefit them.
Gary throws himself into every assignment, donning elaborate disguises, putting on accents, trying out different personalities, and convincing just about everyone that he’s a guy with a serious body count. His methods lead to one conviction after another.
But then he meets the beautiful Madison (Adria Arjona), who wants her estranged, abusive husband dead. In a rare bout of sympathy—and, clearly, lust—Gary talks her out of it. They begin a hot and heavy romance, Madison still under the impression that Gary is a steely-eyed contract killer named Ron. Matters get even more complicated when the husband does, in fact, end up dead.
In a movie filled with costumes, perhaps none is straining as hard as the one attempting to turn Powell into a guy no one would look at twice. He’s been dressed in oversized shirts and pleated khakis and his hair is combed in the most unflattering style imaginable, and yet there’s simply no getting around the fact that he’s got the looks and charisma of a matinee idol. He was not born to play a drab everyman.
Powell and Linklater have also, in their attempts to shoehorn heavier themes of identity and justice into their screenplay, crafted a central conceit that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Why, we wonder, would law enforcement gamble on a freelancer, no matter how chameleonic he may be, with no prior police experience and make him privy to the most sensitive details of multiple federal cases? The real Gary Johnson, who died in 2022, was a part-time community college professor and he did impersonate a cold-blooded assassin so believably that he was called the Laurence Olivier of the field. But he was also a former cop and Vietnam vet who worked for years as a D.A. investigator, not just some guy off the street.
The movie is trying to be a shaggy dog story, and it’s a bit too tidy for that. But Linklater is such a preternatural storyteller that the film moves along nimbly. It’s well-made, it’s tightly paced, it’s entertaining. It’s really a film about performance, and the consequences of disappearing so completely into a role that you start to believe it yourself. Powell’s performance, then, is the reason to see Hit Man. He’s a bona fide movie star, and no frumpy costume can disguise it, try as it might.
For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.
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Nathan Weinbender is one of the film critics heard on Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, Friday evenings at 6:30 PM here on KPBX.