REVIEW: Hit Man [2024]

Rating: R | Runtime: 115 minutes
Release Date: May 24th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Netflix
Director(s): Richard Linklater
Writer(s): Richard Linklater and Glen Powell / Skip Hollandsworth (article “Hit Man”)

All pie is good pie.

What if Gary Johnson, a Vietnam veteran and college professor who moonlighted as an undercover sting operative with the local police, turned that implausibly fantastic resumé into an adventure on the dark side a la Chuck Barris and his “biography” Confessions of a Dangerous Mind? That’s pretty much where Richard Linklater’s head is at with Hit Man—an inspired by reality, fictitiously embellished thriller wherein Gary (Glen Powell, who co-adapts with the director from Skip Hollandsworth’s Texas Monthly article) inches a bit closer to the line than fact would reveal. Maybe the act bleeds into life. Maybe it helps him get the girl. And maybe … a couple bodies get dropped along the way.

I was skeptical at the start of this lark. Powell’s introverted eccentric was a fun character to flesh out and the fish-out-of-water, sink-or-swim act of having to move from being a behind-the-scenes tech assistant to in-person entrapment specialist sans notice once the real detective (Austin Amelio’s Jasper) gets suspended is primed for unhinged comedy, but the payoff proves borderline atrocious. Gary is too effective with his performance from the start to be funny, the scene goes on way too long as the script tries to manufacture a rhythm, and the subsequent montage of “costumes” is over-the-top to the point of cartoon. Thankfully, it’s just the preamble.

Enter Madison Figueroa Masters (Adria Arjona). Here is where the film really begins—and not because of laughs. Her introduction finally grounds things in some semblance of emotion as her purpose as a mark (the police need her to ask Gary to kill her husband while handing over payment for the arrest) becomes usurped by a genuinely empathetic moment of compassion. Madison doesn’t want to kill her husband. She’s simply so drained and exhausted from his domineering ways that she feels she doesn’t have a choice. So, Gary tells her to leave. He makes sure she doesn’t say anything that will incriminate herself in order to escape and build a new life for herself.

Yes, the parallels are obvious (Gary also wants to escape his doldrums and build a new life for himself), but that convenience actually makes the resulting romance and drama better. They both see something in each other that allows them to be who they’ve always wanted to be. It doesn’t matter that it’s based on a lie since neither are necessarily looking for love anyway. They want to exist in a bubble. They want these new identities and the person helping to coax them out to be free of the limitations of their otherwise stale existences. Unfortunately, because of what that lie entailed (a murder-for-hire plot), the bubble will burst.

While it’s not the missed-salvation-of-cinema piece that so much hyperbole on the internet wants to exclaim because people think it’s fun to bag on Netflix and, by extension, filmmakers who “dare” to let streamers “kill” the theatrical experience, Hit Man is great. Would it have played better with a crowd? Probably. But I would never know since our country’s response to COVID has made it so I never would have seen it with a crowd. So, stop clutching your pearls and spouting gatekeeping rhetoric while wrongly labeling studios that pay for this art to get made (yes, I know they didn’t produce this one) as the gatekeepers instead (they are guilty of that crime in many other ways already).

Powell is a star. Arjona is a superstar. And Amelio shows that he deserves a long look from casting directors after a very successful run on “The Walking Dead”. This trio makes the plot sing once the other shoe drops and the electricity on-screen is never better than when they are forced to react to revelations their “real brains” cannot fathom (despite those around them thinking their “fake brains” would). That’s the beauty of the final two-thirds: it’s never as perfect as that first sting. It’s messy—maybe not always in the moment, but definitely before it’s over. It’s superego, ego, and id. The delivery device isn’t as heady as a Waking Life, but Linklater makes certain to keep things intellectually relevant just the same.