Hit Man – An Old-Fashioned Caper Comedy

For our TIFF 2023 review of Hit Man, click here.

At a time when debates rage on about the downhill slope of the summer box office, Netflix is pushing their recently acquired Richard Linklater film, Hit Man, through an embarrassingly small release window. Amidst an intense market including a soft relaunch of the Apes franchise in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, George Miller’s chaotic return to Mad Max with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, and even the undeniable magnetism of Ryan Gosling in The Fall Guy, a movie like Hit Man may not have room to breathe. Yet, despite all of the praise out of Venice and Toronto last September, the film won’t get a chance to prove its worth. This isn’t to say its value is gauged by box office success, but it is the type of film adult couples use as a staple for date night, an old-school caper the modern film landscape is in desperate need of. Instead, it is scheduled for release June 7th on Netflix. Hit Man will be available for those with a Netflix subscription, but it will ultimately be relegated to the peripherals of general audiences unaware of its existence, or its quality.

In a script co-written by Linklater and Glen Powell, Hit Man calls back to the screwball comedies of Howard Hawks and the romantic perversions of Billy Wilder, with Powell’s performance echoing the likes of Cary Grant in a role that wavers between preciously innocent to remarkably charming. Neither of these men could make this “(kind of) based on a true story” work without Adria Arjona, who plays spunky love interest, Madison. Arjona is no novice, despite her filmography consisting of few highlights, but she blossoms into a full-fledged star here. If Powell started earning more roles after appearing in Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), Arjona appears to be on that same trajectory. Backed by the talents of his co-leads, Linklater returns to the best of his sensibilities with a whip-smart, romantically interested script that has a few tricks up its sleeve. It deserves a proper release backed by a better studio, but great films don’t always get what they deserve, and it’ll make movie night at home a hit.

Based on an article that appeared in a 2001 issue of the Texas Monthly magazine, Hit Man is about a part-time staffer, Gary Johnson (Powell), who works undercover for the New Orleans Police Department. The part-time do-gooder also works as a philosophy and psychology professor at the University of New Orleans, and Linklater leans heavily into the relationship Gary has with moonlighting as a faucet of brainy knowledge. Play-acting as a staffer who stumbles into the role of a fake hitman has the initial makings of becoming an over-extended late-night sketch, but Linklater develops an identity crisis for Gary. Through a myriad of colorful costumes and funny accents, Gary’s life, and identity, are subverted by the antagonistic nature of social role-playing.

Thanks to Powell’s commitment to the bit, Linklater can explore the sudden shifts in Gary’s life through the structure of their screenplay. Sprinkled with brief interludes that interject the narrative with classroom-set lessons, Linklater allows Gary the opportunity to express behavioral analysis as a response to his developments outside of class. In a way, it can get a little too explanatory for a viewer more interested in coming to the conclusions themselves, but Wilder wasn’t always known for thematic subtlety either. When properly directed, the story’s resolutions are equally as playful to the interpersonal dynamics of the main character and their supporting cast.

Later into the film, Arjona’s Madison comes into play. Unlike the talky interludes about expectations, ego, identity, and social constructs, Arjona is the physical manifestation of these ideas. Her presence instantly disrupts the balance Gary has found as a fake hitman and a teacher, but her wavelength becomes a rhythmic beat on his path. Tucked in the corner of a diner, Gary and Madison’s first conversation is transactional. There is a comforting routine in this moment for Gary, but a hesitation on Madison’s part. Gary puts on a face for her, but Madison is exploring a part of herself she has yet to tap into. Linklater lets Powell and Arjona banter and romanticize one another for one of the longest stretches of the film up to that point, and you can feel the chemistry radiating between them. Audiences will note their eyes dart around the respective features of the other, or the brief glimmer of a smile in response to a tempestuous joke that shakes the conversation up. Hit Man is entirely contingent on this relationship working as intended, and it succeeds in allowing the audience to feel the radiance of conversational foreplay before we get to the action.

With recent rom-coms eventually evolving into action films sparse with romance and even less effective comedy, Hit Man avoids getting sucked into the status quo. As audiences, we have been deprived of conventionally beautiful movie stars having a chance to play against one another without the story becoming emotionally obtuse. The more Gary continues to play Ron (the man Madison thinks he is), the more romantically charged the film gets. The middle-most part of the film saw Gary and Madison engage in stunning romantic encounters that vary from literal role-playing, to psychological unraveling as they bathe together. Madison and Gary trace each other with their minds and follow each other into the bedroom with their hearts, and the script uses them to express the lengths of their sudden passion with sensational wit over logic.

Hit Man eventually forces the audience to suspend belief for later narrative developments, but at this point one has become so comfortable with the leading dynamic that the logistics don’t matter. This would negatively affect a lesser film if the storyteller was searching for answers that other aspects of the production weren’t providing, but Linklater knows emotional interest matters more than textbook sense. Especially when the story explores the dynamics through the audience’s attempt to identify their moral positions on the theoretical questions Gary poses to his students. Again, the script may articulate some questions that should be left for the audience to decipher from the visual text of the film, but it’s fun to tag along. With interesting characters, it makes a film’s sins much easier to absolve once being invited to participate in the course of action with them.

The only disappointing angle of Hit Man is that it has been mostly exiled to streaming on Netflix. This is of no fault of Linklater and Co. who have little say in the matter, but with a non-competitive slate in early June, there seems to be money left on the table. Which appears to be normalized for a climate comfortable with tax write-offs and mismanaged marketing campaigns. It seems as if the years of counter-programming are waning, or totally obsolete, because Hit Man is primed to be a valuable option at the multiplex as Furiosa and Apes rumble next door. Considering an escalating cost of living, maybe it makes more sense for the film not to have a wide release out of fear of not turning a profit, since numerous films supposedly “struggle” to be opening weekend smash hits. Regardless, a film this good should be presented to the general public on the big screen, with the hope that audiences show up for movies that give them something they hadn’t realized the movies had been missing. Flop or not, it will probably be remembered for being the antithesis of the current summer movie standards. With the blockbuster climate in freefall, an attempt to punctuate the likes of Hit Man may have succeeded, had they chosen a good release date.

Is Hit Man a summer movie contender? Probably not, but it is inarguably a film that harkens back to the times when audiences were attracted to the theaters by the allure of bonafide movie stars. On top of Linklater using the faces of Powell and Arjona to provoke the audience’s inherent desire to learn more about people they’ve never met, he stokes curiosity through old-school tricks. Simply, Linklater lets his characters talk to each other and we fall in love with their inflections, passions, desires, and underlying motives that shape their identity. This doesn’t sound too different from what Linklater accomplished in the Before trilogy, but now, he intertwines his voice with the style of Old Hollywood’s genre trailblazers.

In the end, Hit Man has all the makings of a film audiences will fall in love with this year; a performance that is sure to cement Glen Powell as a star that’ll be around for a while, a sizzling Adria Arjona not too far behind, and a return to form for Richard Linklater. For those unsure about the film being released nowadays, keeping date night indoors with one of the easiest, breeziest, and funniest films of the year doesn’t sound so bad.

still courtesy of VVS Films

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Roman Arbisi

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