Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Richard Linklater
Starring: Glen Powell, Adria Arjona, Austin Amelio, Retta, Sanjay Rao, Evan Holtzman
Entire rain forests have been levelled to accommodate the volumes written
on what makes cinema work, but sometimes it boils down to something as
simple as having two attractive and charismatic movie stars make googly eyes
at one another. Rising stars Glen Powell and Adria Arjona are
as attractive and charismatic as they come, and they spend much of
Richard Linklater's comedic thriller Hit Man making
googly eyes at one another. Bathing in such magnetism is enough to keep us
amused for most of the film, until a messy final act that exposes just how
heavily the movie has relied on the distracting charm of its two
leads.
Like Linklater's Jack Black vehicle
Bernie, Hit Man is inspired by a true crime story, that of Gary
Johnson, a college professor who moonlit as a fake hitman for the police.
His second job saw him meet with people looking to off their spouses,
colleagues, mothers-in-law etc and record their intent with a hidden
microphone. Linklater opens his film with a disclaimer that makes it clear
very little of what you're about to see really happened, but his protagonist
is named Gary Johnson nonetheless and pops up in the obligatory closing
credits images of the real Gary.
Gary is played by Powell as a nerdy bird-watching philosophy teacher who
bores the pants off the kids in his college class, where he delivers
thematically on-the-nose lectures about the nature of the self. At first
he's simply manning the recording equipment for the New Orleans police while
an undercover cop, Jasper (Austin Amelio), plays the fake hitman
role. But when Jasper is suspended for an act of police brutality, Gary
finds himself thrust into the part of the paid assassin. Initially nervous,
as soon as he sits down across a diner table from a potential "client," he
discovers the role of a cold and calculated professional killer fits him
like a glove. Impressing his superiors in the NOPD, Gary takes on the job
permanently, much to the annoyance of the returning Jasper, and develops an
array of fake personas, each one tailored to the specific client he's trying
to incriminate.
When he's tasked with meeting Madison (Arjona), a beautiful woman who wants
to do away with her abusive husband, Gary opts for the role of "Ron", a
suave hitman who likes to wear black and sports designer stubble. Taking
pity on Madison, Gary/Ron advises her to take the money she was willing to
use to fund her husband's execution and build a new life for herself. He
even gives her his phone number and tells her to contact him if she ever
needs help. Remarkably, his law enforcement bosses seem fine with this
wildly unprofessional act.
When Madison contacts the man she believes to be killer-for-hire Ron, Gary
maintains the facade and the pair begin a steamy relationship. Rather than
being terrified of Ron, Madison seems thoroughly excited by the idea of
dating someone who kills for a living. She even agrees to Ron's terms of
only seeing him when he says so, and never meeting at his home. This
arrangement works a treat at first, but things begin to get complicated when
Jasper discovers what Gary has been up to and Madison's husband comes back
into the picture.
There's one glaring issue with Hit Man, and that's how Powell so easily convinces as the suave and charismatic
Ron, but always comes across as though he's putting on a role whenever he
appears as Gary. For the part to work, it should be the other way around.
Gary's glasses, bad haircut and terrible shirts come off as a disguise
rather than the cool wardrobe sported by Ron, which naturally fits Powell's
toned Hollywood physique. The film tries to make it clear, through a
combination of Gary's voiceover narration and the lectures he delivers to
his students, that Ron might indeed be Gary's true persona, but the switch
from Gary to Ron is too immediate for us to buy into this idea. We really
need to see Gary gradually ease into the role of Ron rather than the instant
transformation we get here, which is as immediate as Clark Kent changing
into his tights and cape in a phone box. It's a bit like if Bill Murray was
able to seduce Andie MacDowell on the first attempt in
Groundhog Day without the need for any of his failed
rehearsals.
So much of the film's running time is devoted to Ron rather than Gary that
it's easy to forget the latter is playing the former. As a result, much of
the movie plays like a comedy about a hitman dating a client, rather than a
college professor playing a hitman in order to keep dating her. There's very
little sense that Ron/Gary is in danger of getting caught out. In order to
create the required tension, the movie needs more moments of Ron fumbling
the ball and regressing into Gary in Madison's presence. Even when Jasper
cottons on to Gary's ruse, it takes too long for the crooked cop's true
intentions to be made clear.
Underneath the breezy rom-com trappings lies a dark undercurrent that the
movie never grapples with, possibly because it's not entirely aware of its
presence. The central idea of a man pretending to be someone else to get
laid might have innocently fuelled comedies in previous eras, but it's too
loaded a concept now for a movie to play it as lightly as it's rendered
here. Gary is always portrayed as a "good guy" despite engaging in what
amounts to a form of sexual assault over a prolonged period of time. His
Nietzschean philosophy often sounds like the sort of "embracing your inner
Alpha Male" tripe spouted by the likes of Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.
If the movie was willing to acknowledge this we might have a much blacker
and likely more interesting comedy to wrestle with. In the climax the
narrative takes a surprisingly dark shift but again it's played so breezily
that it suggests the movie doesn't grasp its own darkness.
Hit Man thinks Gary is akin to the sort of
nice-guy-who-just-needs-a-break roles John Cusack played in the '80s, when
he's actually much closer to the manipulative misogynist embodied by Aaron
Eckhart in Neil Labute's In the Company of Men.
