Richard Linklater’s Hit Man has all the ingredients to become a streaming hit on Netflix.
The movie, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival back in September 2023, will hit the platform on June 7, and combines a hilarious premise with a steamy love affair between two gorgeous people (always a plus), and a thrill-ride of twists and turns. To add to that already highly effective cocktail, Hit Man is also coated with a kind of thematic richness that makes it insightful beyond just being great entertainment.
Conceived by Linklater and a bright-starred Glen Powell during the pandemic as a fictionalized version of the life of the real Gary Johnson, the film was inspired by a 2001 Texas Monthly article about a fake hitman working for the police. The fictional version played by Powell lives in New Orleans and teaches philosophy and psychology at the university for a living while doing part-time tech work for the police. When an undercover hitman position opens up, Gary is appointed, and despite some initial anxieties, he jumps head-first into the challenge.
Outside of his police work, the leading man lives alone with his two cats, Id and Ego, and his birds, drives a Honda Civic, and maintains the same routine every day, but when he gets his first fake hitman job he discovers a knack for impersonating and dwelling alongside criminals. As Gary creates new personas, carefully crafted to be especially relatable to each client, he describes it as field research for his academic interests, paralleling the film’s main storyline with a continuous reflection on the human personality.
Things take a bit of a turn when one of Gary’s clients turns out to be a woman called Madison (Adria Arjona) who is desperate to escape her abusive husband, a situation which, in his opinion, makes her less deserving of jail time than all his other catches. While in character as the self-assured nonchalant charmer Ron, Gary tells Madison she should use the money that she put aside to order the hit on her husband to leave and get a new life instead. It doesn’t take long before the duo enters a relationship, which starts off as purely sexual but soon evolves into a genuine romance.
Powell and Arjona are sizzling together, their natural sex appeal jumping out of the screen as you immediately bite into this perilous relationship. Although we are fully aware of Gary’s duplicitous game and can notice him slowly morphing into his Ron persona until it no longer feels like an act, Madison is a much more obscure, hard-to-read character. We constantly get the feeling that she’s not fully genuine and that she could be hiding a secret as big as Gary’s, thanks largely to Arjona’s modern-day femme fatale performance, which pairs innocence with danger.
With each different conundrum Gary encounters in this tangled web of reality and play-pretend, there is a college lesson to go along with it, framing it within a wider moral and psychological context. Do we need to take risks to enjoy life to the fullest? Can a person change? What separates instinct from logic? Is murder ever justified? The movie provides partial answers, but often prefers to invite the viewer to engage in their own debates and reach their own conclusions. The plot would remain unaltered if we didn’t get these pauses to theorize about the characters’ choices, but it is undeniably richer for their inclusion.
Even with these large strokes of philosophical musings, Hit Man never takes itself seriously enough to present as a proper think piece, preferring to exist on a much more superficial level instead. Regardless, they do add a special color to what could otherwise just be your run-of-the-mill cop/romantic comedy.
Glen Powell does a wonderful job translating these themes into his performance, which he keeps rightfully understated despite having more than enough excuses for eccentricity. He hops from one character to another, from white trash to Russian mobster, from wig to wig, and accent to accent, but somehow never comes across as ridiculous or overly theatrical. More extensive and subtle are the gradually blurring lines between Gary and Ron, his two most lived-in personalities, which are very precisely constructed in Linklater and Powell’s script, and will almost pass you by if you’re not paying attention.
It feels rewarding to watch a comedy that is light and thought-provoking in equal measure. The characters and storylines don’t just exist to serve the plot or entertain but to prove a point about human relationships, and you will get a kick out of Hit Man if that’s how you choose to engage with it. The movie’s genius, though, is that it still works as a knotty, unpredictable crime thriller, especially as it ventures into genre-familiar murderous territory, which is all the more engaging for the toned-down brand of dark comedy that adorns it.
Likewise, if the romance plot is more your speed, then there’s plenty of goodness there too. Linklater and Powell never use comedy as an excuse to shy away from delving deeper into the more complicated, complex sides of their leading duo as they get to know each other a bit better (with or without clothes on). There are multiple swoon-worthy, palm-sweating romantic scenes between the two leads even if the pacing of their relationship doesn’t exactly ebb and flow as smoothly as the rest of the film. Nevertheless, you understand what they see in each other at every turn and can’t help but root for their happy ending.
Hit Man excels in the way its script and Linklater’s directing navigate and balance all these tonal differences and genre conventions. Much like its protagonist, the film is an amalgam of personalities, not entirely one thing or the other, but a combination of genres that, through careful writing, each manages to maintain their essence throughout.
There is also a simplicity to it that feels refreshing in the face of the bigger-and-brighter production model that has dominated Hollywood in the past few years. Don’t expect show-stopping set pieces, car chases, fight sequences, convoluted murder plots, or dodgy CGI here. No, Hit Man won’t leave you on the edge of your seat, but it will put your brain to work in different, more contemplative ways, all while dressing it up with good-natured humor, titillating sexiness, and a top-tier career-best performance from Powell.
