‘Hit Man’ Review
With just a little nudge, we can all become someone worse-better.
[Some mild spoilers—really just hints of spoilers—for Hit Man follow, but if you’re particularly sensitive about that sort of thing please read this after you see the film so I don’t have to hire Gary Johnson to come for you when you complain.]
I’VE FREQUENTLY ENJOYED Richard Linklater’s movies about charming weirdos with a penchant for showbiz-like flashiness, in large part because they’ve given us a chance to see more interesting sides of actors we thought we knew.
Everyone who loved The Iron Claw for Zac Efron’s heartfelt performance should revisit Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles, a 2008 film in which a high school student (Efron) is cast in Welles’s production of Julius Caesar. For those who knew him as little more than the song-and-dance kid from the three High School Musical movies, it was a glimpse of something more soulful within. A couple of years later, Linklater’s Bernie showed that Jack Black was more than an over-the-top goof: He played Bernie Tiede, a mortician’s assistant in Texas who becomes the companion of an overbearing widow, eventually murdering the meanspirited woman and hiding it by pretending she was convalescing, all while using her money to aid his neighbors in the town. His decency and generosity with the widow’s money led the townsfolk to rally to his side during his trial.
Glen Powell is the hot new thing, fresh off spotlight-stealing turns in Top Gun: Maverick as the overconfident Hangman (or is he Yahweh?) and Anyone But You, the little romcom that could. Trailers for the forthcoming Twisters just prove that Hollywood is all in on Powell right now: the twin towers of wind play second fiddle to his jean jackets and cowboy hat and country twang. Of course, some of us remember him as the douchey finance bro from The Dark Knight Rises, and it’s in that role that you can see just why he would be appealing: the handsome looks, the good hair, the perfect jawline. He just screams “classic movie star.” “Glen Powell” even sounds like the name of a guy who belongs in MGM’s collection of stars, somewhere in a middle row, Louis B. Mayer propped up front.
What’s fascinating about Linklater’s new film, Hit Man, is that it takes everything so appealing about Powell and subverts it—at least at first. As the film begins, his Gary Johnson is a college psychology professor who doesn’t quite command the attention of his students, a nebbish whose skills with a soldering iron get him part-time work with the New Orleans PD as a tech nerd on busts, a man who can barely dress himself (jean shorts? Really?), a dude who lives with his two cats, Ego and Id. Forced to fill in for undercover detective Jasper (Austin Amelio) when he gets suspended for brutalizing some teenagers, Gary cottons to the role of fake hit man.
As a professor whose area of study is the mind and the way we conceive ourselves, Gary quickly realizes that every “customer” is looking for a different salesman, someone who can put them at ease. Be it a Russian-accented goon or a MAGA-adjacent good ol’ boy or a character I can only describe as “Tilda Swinton by way of Wes Anderson,” Gary researches what his clients are looking for and how best to fit their needs. Gary decides that Madison “Maddy” Masters (Adria Arjona) is looking for someone tough and efficient and suave, and while working as “Ron” he quickly falls for her and talks her out of asking for her husband to be killed. They start dating. He falls fully into the role of Ron. The husband winds up dead. Who did it? And why?
As a romcom, Hit Man is tidily effective. The romance between Ron and Maddy is real and steamy, in a decidedly PG-13 sort of way. (This film is technically rated R, but the violence is nonexistent and the sex is very much of the clothes-mostly-on, bodies-covered-up sort; it caught the MPA’s ire for a handful of F-bombs.) The comedy is perfectly timed and the face-acting from Powell and Arjona both is top notch; there’s a sequence toward the end that feels like something out of a classic farce, a constant mismatch of what is said and what is done and the ways they express their frustration and joy at what is happening is quite delightful to watch. Retta and Sanjay Rao add in a healthy dose of laughs as cops partnered with Gary.
It does feel like Linklater, who wrote the script with Powell based on real events,1 is hinting at something more here, though, particularly in the interludes at Gary’s University of New Orleans classes. Interspersed with the vignettes of Gary taking down would-be assassin-purchasers, we see his lectures. Again, it’s mostly psychology, asking questions about how much we can change, how much of our personality is a choice, how the wild desires of the id merge with the social impulses of the superego to create a more responsible ego.
But then, there’s an interesting little bit about society and punishment. We hear students debating how best to handle miscreants. They sentence a hypothetical modern murderer to life without parole—a very modern outcome, as Gary congratulates them. But what about a threat in the paleolithic age, before society, before prisons. What then? How to deal with an existential threat to the tribe, specifically: a leader who will lead them to ruin? The students are torn. Some suggest exile. Most, however, believe that death is the only way forward. And Gary, pleased, informs them that there is some thinking that human evolution was very much guided by civilizations, at key moments, pruning the deficiencies promoted by such leaders. Targeted assassination, he suggests, helped the species survive and thrive.
The two strands of lectures—about the ability of people to change themselves by choosing to live differently, and about the need to occasionally eliminate threats to the common good—dovetail perfectly with what happens in the film. Gary chooses to become someone else and in that choosing crosses lines he never thought possible; as a result, he creates a series of net benefits to society writ large by eliminating threats to the common good.2 It’s as if screenwriters Linklater and Powell are saying to the mild-mannered professorial types out there who would never imagine acting in violence to further their cause that, you know, sometimes it’s Good, Actually to eliminate troublesome elements plaguing your polis.
For society’s sake!
Powell and Linklater based the screenplay on the 2001 Texas Monthly article “Hit Man” by Skip Hollandsworth, the same journalist credited with co-writing the screenplay for Linklater’s Bernie based on a previous article of his.
It is worth noting that the “elimination” portion of the film is entirely fictional—the real-life Gary Johnson never actually killed anyone, unlike in the film; he simply play-acted as a killer for the sake of the investigations—deepening the feeling that it’s less portrayal by Linklater and more . . . suggestion.