HIT MAN (2024) is on the more crowdpleasing side of Richard Linklater movies, a sort of comedy, sort of romance, sort of noir, sort of true story that’s good enough to sort of make me forgive the “based on a true story… sort of” disclaimer and related dad joke vibes. For me it doesn’t quite live up to the hype from the Toronto International Film Festival, where it apparently blew the roof off, but it’s definitely worth watching if you already get Netflix, where it ended up.
This is really a star vehicle for Glen Powell, an Austinite who worked with Linklater in FAST FOOD NATION, EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!! and APOLLO 10 1/2 (an animated/rotoscoped movie that’s also on Netflix, and quite good) before blowing up in TOP GUN: MAVERICK and ANYONE BUT YOU. Now the two of them teamed up to co-write and co-produce this showcase for Powell doing more than just his usual cocky hunky guy thing (but also that). He plays Gary Johnson, a New Orleans psychology professor who lives alone with two cats, enjoys bird watching, and tucks his polo shirts into his cargo shorts. He’s a dabbler who moonlights as a tech guy for the police, recording undercover stings busting people who were asking around about putting a hit out on somebody. When Jasper (Austin Amelio, The Walking Dead) is suspended for excessive force, Gary is pushed into playing the hitman, digs deep to create a macho character, and turns out to be very good at it.
Part of the joke is that “hit men” are a Hollywood invention, there’s no true way to portray one and as a psychologist he gets really into researching the targets and creating different characters he thinks they’d want to be their hitman. So Powell gets to use different costumes and accents and portray different characters, at times looking like a Tim Heideker character, or seeming to imitate Matthew McConaghey or Tilda Swinton. So there’s lots of comedy there, but he also starts to self-actualize, because he likes being the fake self-assured version of himself, even if it involves a fantasy of being a master killer and disposer of bodies. He’s not actually doing that stuff, but why not be that guy for a while?
The romance comes in when Gary under the guise of “Ron” meets with potential client Madison Figueroa (Adria Arjona, TRIPLE FRONTIER, 6 UNDERGROUND, MORBIUS), and they immediately hit it off like it’s a really good first date. To the frustration of his colleagues instead of taking her money he encourages her to use it to move away from her jerk husband and start a new life. She takes his advice, calls to thank him after she settles in, and he falls into a relationship with her, pretending to be Ron. Just a little bit off from the standard romcom charades.
Then the noir comes in when her husband Ray (Evan Holtzman, HIDDEN FIGURES) gets jealous and Jasper, still sore that Gary took over his job, becomes suspicious of the strange things he’s doing to cover up his double life. As Gary tries to cover up his lies to both Madison and his co-workers he gets involved in more dangerous deceptions and actual crimes.
It crawls into these dark places, both for laughs and for some pretty effective discomfort. It subverts its own romance story, getting us to like Madison and want her to like Gary but we can’t help but notice that she’s attracted to him despite – or more likely because of – believing he’s a professional killer, so that’s a problem. It’s a relief when everything’s cleared up and somehow turns out okay, but it feels like a cheat. That’s where it wobbles for me. It was going somewhere interesting only to say “nah, don’t worry, that was all fake.”
The movie was inspired by a Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth, same thing that happened with Linklater’s BERNIE, although in that case he had Hollandsworth do the adaptation with him, and discouraged him from fictionalizing. For this one he took a different approach.
According to the article, the real Gary Johnson grew up in Lousiana, but he ended up in Houston. He did have two cats, but was into goldfish instead of birds. He did teach two courses at a community college (human sexuality and general psychology) and have an ex-wife he was still friends with. A teenager did pay him for a hit with loose change and video games, but it was so long ago they were Atari cartridges. “All pie is good pie,” which weirdly seems to be his motto in the movie, was his code for clients to identify him. And at the end of the article it does tell about a time when he felt sorry for the suspect because she was being abused. Instead of doing the sting operation at all he helped set her up with social services and a women’s shelter.
So basically they just took the idea of this type of nerd doing this type of job, and sprung off of the last part to turn it into a romance. Like many movies based on magazine articles it’s sort of at war with itself, because the thing that makes it interesting in the first place is the reality that separates it from regular movies, but the thing it ends up emphasizing is the bullshit they threw in to make it play as a regular movie. Maybe that’s my own hangup, though. ARGO won best picture. People worship PAIN & GAIN. Most people don’t care. And HIT MAN, both the article and the movie, are interesting in their own ways.
The thing we all agree on is that Powell is an exciting actor and should get more vehicles like this to do his thing, whatever that turns out to be. He’s a hunk playing a nerd playing a hunk, and it works, so there’s probly something there. I never saw it coming but somehow Powell has pulled ahead of Kellan Lutz and Ronda Rousey for the coveted title of Most Promising Young Expendable From EXPENDABLES 3.
June 11th, 2024 at 8:25 am
I liked this one a lot. Most of that is down to the two leads having great chemistry and doing a good job. It was a lot of fun to see Powell in the various roles. Not just the hitman, but also the nerd/professor, which while it’s not 100% believable that a guy that hot would be that nerdy, it works. And I thought she did a great job at playing the “crazy but hot” woman. A lot of those roles are too much, too annoying in their crazy, but she was believably someone you’d let that slide with. By the way, Vern, he’s a psychology AND philosophy professor. I’m only being pedantic about it because I liked the philosophy stuff he talked about in his classes. I found all the psych/philosophy stuff interesting.
I’m okay with the stuff at the end that Vern didn’t like and that’s two fold.
SPOILERS
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1 – I think of it like it’s this movie’s version of the bus on SPEED making that jump. Yeah, it’s probably not going to go like that in real life, but I like it so I’m going to go with it.
2 – I’m fascinated by this idea that they could do these horrible, morally reprehensible things they had to do to survive (in their minds at the least) and be just fine with it. It doesn’t mean that they become murderous villains who turn to violence to solve all their problems. I guess one could make the argument that we don’t know that. Maybe they are out committing murder willie nillie, but I don’t think the movie is saying that’s what happened. Also, I think we can definitely say the movie is saying that they are happy. This means they aren’t tormented by their actions. They just got on with their lives, doing what they could to thrive and be happy. Perhaps he’s a stabilizing influence on her and she influences him to be more bold and messy and take chances, so they self actualized themselves into the people that make themselves and each other happy. I think that’s interesting.