Richard Linklater remains one of my favorite filmmakers. He made us laugh in mainstream efforts like “Dazed and Confused” (1993) and “School of Rock” (2004), while making us think and feel in acclaimed longitudinal studies like “Boyhood” (2014), filmed in short installments over 12 years, and his trilogy of “Before Sunrise” (1995), “Before Sunset” (2004) and “Before Midnight” (2013), charting a love story in nine-year increments.
Now, his latest dark comedy “Hit Man” has received rave reviews from critics since it premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and was acquired by Netflix for $20 million at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, including The New York Times recently ranking it on its list of the Best Movies of 2024, So Far.
However, now that the film is dropping this Friday on Netflix, I have a feeling that at-home viewers will find it amusing for its comedic phoniness in the first half but disappointing for its phony seriousness in the second half.
Based on the 2001 Texas Monthly magazine article by Skip Hollandsworth, the film follows Gary Johnson, a college psychology professor who moonlights for the New Orleans Police Department as a tech surveillance guy. When his colleague calls out sick, Gary fills in as a fake hit man, recording a murder-for-hire scheme before the cops rush in to make an arrest. Turns out, Gary’s great at the gig, but is it entrapment or great detective work?
After playing John Glenn in “Hidden Figures” (2016), Glen Powell has become all the rage across Tom Cruise in “Top Gun: Maverick” (2021) and Sydney Sweeney in “Anyone But You” (2023). In “Hit Man,” he cowrites with Linklater, crafting a role that allows himself to show his range by playing various alter egos as he fantasizes fresh identities as fake hit men. He’s a charismatic screen presence for sure, boasting a Ryan Gosling-style charisma.
His funniest moments come bantering with his surveillance-van partners, played by Retta (“Parks & Rec”), Sanjay Rao (“The Flight Attendant”) and Austin Amelio (“The Walking Dead”) during stakeouts like “The Conversation” (1974). He pivots from comedy to sexual tension when he falls for one of his criminal targets, Maddy Masters (Adria Arjona, “True Detective”), who finds his “body count” sexy as he convinces her to not whack her husband.
Linklater is clearly going for a neo-noir erotic thriller like “Basic Instinct” (1992), but if this were truly a noir, the femme fatale would drag him down with her like “Double Indemnity” (1944), leave him broken like “Chinatown” (1974) or doom him to jail while she escapes like “Body Heat” (1981). It feels forced for them both to live happily ever after — to me, “Gone Girl” (2014) was the rare film to pull this off because it was “miserably after ever.”
In this way, the opening comedy section works far better than the middle section where the script starts spinning its wheels as it becomes Fifty Shades of “Gary.” This isn’t a prudish critique — my wife and I are binge-watching “Bridgerton!” — but this “Hit Man” gets screwed more than Bret Hart in Montreal. Their steamy romance could have been handled in one erotic scene or even a montage, leaving more room for actual character development.
As is, we barely know anything about Maddy, let alone her supposedly abusive ex-husband Ray (Evan Holtzman) or Gary’s supposedly critical ex-wife Alisha (Molly Bernard). I say “supposedly” because the script does little to show their alleged flaws. The female characters are frustratingly one dimensional, which is disappointing considering Linklater did such a thorough job fleshing out Patrica Arquette’s Oscar-winning role as a single mom in “Boyhood.”
Ultimately, “Hit Man” isn’t “sh*t, man,” it just could have been so much better. Just as Gary lectures students at the chalkboard of his classroom, great films should contain the proper amounts of “id,” “ego” and “superego.” I suppose Linklater’s idea was to open with the protagonist’s “ego” (logical sense of self as perceived by others), fall victim to his “id” in the middle (animalistic desires), then finish with his “superego” (finding a balance between the two).
However, this equilibrium is never achieved in the final act, or at least it does not feel earned. It’s basically “id, id, id” all the way home to the end credits, which reveal that the story was based on a real guy who posed as a hit man to make dozens of arrests. Linklater winks at the audience by saying, “He didn’t kill people, we made that part up,” but I wonder how the guy’s family feels about taking such liberties? Alas, the ending feels as fake as its hit man.
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