Hit Man: That Would Describe Richard Linklater, if I Had Any Say in Things
The prolific director's latest film is a entertaining romp that also has some interesting stuff on its mind about identity
Hit Man
Directed by Richard Linklater
Written by Richard Linklater and Glen Powell
Streaming on Netflix
2024
I think there are two broad categories of Richard Linklater movies. You’ve got the well-crafted, crowd-pleasing entertainments, like School of Rock, Dazed and Confused, or his Bad News Bears remake. Then you’ve got the rich character studies like Boyhood, the Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight trilogy, and Bernie. There are also the experimental entries in his filmography, like Slacker, Waking Life, and A Scanner Darkly, but those seem to be more of a subset of a latter category rather than a separate group of their own. There’s not exactly a clear boundary between these categories though. Linklater fills his movies with well-realized, fascinating characters who occasionally spend time expounding on their life philosophies so that we can understand them better. That blurs the lines a bit, making it so you’re often unsure about exactly what you’re going to get.
With his latest, that’s more true than ever, and Hit Man might be an entry in the Linklater canon that straddles the lines and never settles in one group or the other. It’s an incredibly entertaining story that’s based on the life of a real person (adapted from an article by Skip Hollandsworth, just like Bernie), but it’s also an exploration of the philosophy of identity, questioning whether we can choose to be different people than we are, and whether that’s a good idea. It’s kind of heady stuff for a romantic comedy that briefly strays into the realm of a thriller.
So, we’ve got Hollywood’s handsome man of the moment, Glen Powell, playing Gary Johnson, a philosophy professor who moonlights as an advisor to the New Orleans police, helping them use high-tech recording equipment to catch people who are planning to hire someone to commit murder. When the cop who usually poses as a hitman in these cases gets suspended for misconduct, Gary has to step in, and he’s unexpectedly good at it. It turns out he really enjoys researching the people he’s investigating and setting up for a fall, finding out exactly what persona they’ll respond to and saying the right things to get them to commit to paying money in exchange for murder.
Powell gets a lot of mileage out of his various roles. He nerds himself up a bit at the beginning, making Gary’s primary professor persona a goofy, lamely-dressed straight man, although you can still tell there’s a handsome, charming guy lurking under that exterior. But he really comes to life when he gets to be a suave, smooth-talking, Hollywood-style hitman, and he comes up with a variety of other goofball personalities, including one that seems to be inspired by Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman, one that looks kind of like Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh, and various redneck shitkickers sporting neck tattoos and silly southern accents. He’s clearly having a lot of fun, and hey, the audience is too.
Things get more complicated when Gary and his cop pals investigate Madison (Adria Arjona), a young woman who seems to be ready to kill her rich husband. When he meets her, he starts out operating smoothly, being as charming and sexy as possible, but when he realizes that she’s scared to death of her husband and just wants out of an abusive marriage, he talks her out of the murder-for-hire scheme. In a bit of commentary that’s fairly subtle, the police aren’t too happy about this; they want to add an arrest to their stats, and they don’t seem to really care about this woman’s safety or whether it would help anyone to throw her in jail.
While it might seem like Gary would be able to move forward after this incident and get back to busting people who actually have murderous intent, he seems to enjoy being Ron, the persona he adopted to seduce Madison, especially after overhearing the other cops talk about how hot and sophisticated he seemed in the moment. So he inadvisably ends up meeting Madison again and striking up a relationship with her, staying in character as a sexy, dangerous guy who turns her on while trying to avoid any public activity that could expose him as a fraud.
The movie gets a lot of mileage out of the hotness of this situation, with “Ron” and Madison having lots of sex and Gary really starting to love being this version of himself. As he discusses with his ex-wife and his philosophy students, is it really possible to change his personality and become someone he wants to be? And the question becomes, is it really a good idea to pretend to be a guy who has no morals and is willing to break the law to get what he wants?
This is all fun stuff, and it’s refreshing to see a movie approach sex and sensuality in a straightforward manner like this, in an era where sexiness has mostly been scrubbed from movie screens. When the movie takes a turn into thriller territory involving Madison’s ex-husband and Gary’s attempts to keep his secret life from being exposed, I feel like it’s less successful. It’s still entertaining, but it derails the story into unbelievable territory, taking attention away from the psychological intrigue and character study (notably, some on-screen captions celebrating the life of the real Gary Johnson that appear before the end credits take care to make sure we understand that any crimes he is depicted as committing in the movie were made up). But I guess that’s what you get when you Hollywoodize somebody’s life.
Even if I wasn’t fully satisfied with the direction the movie took, I still liked where it ended up. It seems to act as an encouragement for people to avoid feeling like they’re locked in to unhappy situations. Reinvention is possible, even down to the personality level, as long as we’re clear-eyed about what we want. Even if the movie may hint that lying and deception are possible ways to achieve these goals, it ultimately comes down on the side of staying true to who you are while striving to make the changes you want. I can get behind that.