Finally, an Honest-to-Goodness Great New Rom-Com
Like Richard Linklater’s breakthrough film, Slacker, his 22nd feature Hit Man kicks off with a bit of philosophy. In Slacker, that meant Linklater himself sitting in the back of an Austin taxicab, holding forth to an unimpressed driver about the idea that every choice not made creates its own alternate reality, which we’re unable to see only because of our own locked-in perspective. The movie unfolds as a formally radical exploration of that idea: The young thinker in the cab gives way to a series of momentary protagonists, each connected to the next only by the chance encounter that brings them together.
In Hit Man, it’s Glen Powell, Linklater’s onscreen alter ego (he first caught my eye in Linklater’s semi-autobiographical Everybody Wants Some!!) and offscreen fellow Austinite, who starts the movie on a moment of musing. His character, a professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of New Orleans, is lecturing on a passage from Nietzsche about the possibility of self-reinvention. As with Slacker, the movie that follows will be a playful exploration of that very concept. To be sure, Hit Man is far from formally radical, instead operating in the familiar if reliably fun genre of the con-artist thriller: specifically, the kind in which the con artist in question discovers their true self via their gift for the game. (Steven Spielberg’s classic caper Catch Me If You Can fits this template, as does the romance at the center of the perfect series Better Call Saul.)
Hit Man is loosely based on a 2001 Texas Monthly story by writer Skip Hollandsworth, who also wrote the article that inspired Linklater’s dark comedy Bernie. The subject of both profile and film is Gary Johnson, who, in addition to teaching part time at a local college, holds down a job for which he possesses a particular set of skills: playing the role of a professional assassin in sting operations designed to take down people who are plotting to contract out the murder of their loved ones or criminal associates.
Using wigs, costumes, and sometimes even false teeth, Gary invents a whole stable of personae to fit the needs of each client: a slick-haired charmer inspired by Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, an elegant Brit with a fastidious sneer, a dirtbag biker type with a scraggly beard and neck tattoos. An early montage featuring Gary’s experiments with disguises lends these encounters an antic mood, even if his conversations with his murder-minded clients offer glimpses into the grim depths of human nature. The montage also lays out how scarily good Gary is at his job: Each encounter ends with a mug shot spinning its way onto the screen the way newspapers used to in old movies, as the would-be murderer is arrested, put on trial, and often (but not always) sent to jail.
In his non-secret life, Gary is a lonely introvert, but he hits on his most transformative character when he creates the laid-back Ron, essentially a more confident and sexier version of himself, who happens to be the character on duty the day he meets with Madison Masters (Adria Arjona). While the cops listen in via wiretap, Madison and Ron share a piece of pie at a diner as she confides in him about the abusive husband whose death she is trying to arrange. Gary-as-Ron sympathizes with this confused (and, not for nothing, gorgeous) young woman, and in the course of their conversation he steers her toward giving up her plan and walking away, rather than getting her to incriminate herself on tape as intended. The detective leading the operation is annoyed, but Gary’s knack for bagging potential criminals means he gets little more than a rap on the knuckles.
The second half of Hit Man is so twist-packed that all plot description should end there. It’s enough to know that Madison, having left her husband per Gary-as-Ron’s advice, strikes up a steamy romance with the man she still thinks is the world’s most sensitive murderer-for-hire. Meanwhile, Gary, fearful of being caught in this unprofessional affair by his co-workers, insists their relationship be kept secret for, you know, hit-man reasons. Romancing the woman you talked out of killing her husband while pretending to have a day job as a contract killer is an unsustainable model for lasting intimacy, yet the audience finds itself rooting for the unlikely film-noir couple: a wannabe real murderer and a genuine fake one.
For all its gritty genre elements, Hit Man is at heart a cozy hangout movie, a minor but thoroughly enjoyable entry in the Linklater canon. Not unlike Bernie, it uses a charismatic central performance to turn a true-crime story into a bittersweet character study. The editing is brisk, the music jaunty, and the use of the New Orleans setting often visually witty: As he navigates his ever-deepening legal and ethical dilemma, Gary drives past the intersection of Law and Desire streets, and later, pulls up at the real-life crossroads of Piety and Pleasure.
Hit Man’s ending, though it includes at least one bracingly clever twist, never quite plays out these moral conflicts at the level of complexity one might wish for from a filmmaker as interested in big ideas as Linklater. But the movie’s casual sexy-smart mood, its admirably swift pacing, and Glen Powell’s funny, moving, ingeniously shape-shifting performance—which I would call “star-making” were he not already well on his way to being one—provide reasons aplenty to put it on your viewing list. (All the more impressive is that Powell, with Linklater, co-wrote the screenplay, gifting himself the perfect vehicle to show off not just his abs but his range.) And given that Netflix is only allowing the movie a two-week theatrical run before putting it on streaming, you’d do well to get to the theater to see it this weekend if you want to keep seeing romantic thrillers of this unusually high caliber.
