Hit Man (Preview)
Reviewed by Thomas Doherty

Produced by Mike Blizzard, Richard Linklater, Glen Powell, Jason Bateman, and Michael Costigan; directed by Richard Linklater; screenplay by Richard Linklater and Glen Powell, based on an article by Skip Hollandsworth; cinematography by Shane F. Kelly; edited by Sandra Adair; music by Graham Reyolds; starring Glen Powell, Adria Arjona, Austin Amelio, Sanjay Rao, and Retta. Color. 115 min., 2023. A Netflix release.

“What you’re about to see is a somewhat true story, inspired by the life of Gary Johnson,” reads the crawl at the top of Richard Linklater’s Rom-Comish, neonoir Hit Man, a film that, like its title character, shape-shifts seamlessly between personalities. Dressed up as breezy entertainment, it has an alter ego as a philosophical meditation on the nature of self and the immutability of character. The salutation is the first epistemological giveaway, the sign-off at the end the second: the real Gary Johnson, we are assured, was a chill dude who committed “zero murders—we made that part up.” The (functionally) straight-to-Netflix-streaming hit doubles as a seminar in Philosophy 101. 

Which is appropriate because Gary Johnson (“It” boy of the moment, Glen Powell, who with Linklater co-wrote the script, based on a Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth) is a dorky professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of New Orleans. Introduced lecturing to an unrealistically attentive, if passive, and mildly participatory class, he name-checks Nietzsche (not a throwaway reference) and approvingly passes on the German’s advice to carpe diem and live dangerously. “Says the guy driving a Civic,” snarks a student. (Later, the kids will chuckle appreciatively at a Plato-Descartes-Kant reference. They’ve all done the reading!) 

Sure enough, Gary is no Übermensch. By all appearances, he seems to have serenely settled into a life of quotidian contentment rather than quiet desperation. He feeds his birds, waters his plants, dotes on his two cats (Id and Ego, cute), and kind of likes frying up his sad cuisine. If anything sets him apart, it is his tech-geek savvy with electronic devices, a talent not ordinarily associated with liberal artsy types, and a skill that lands him a gig moonlighting with a police squad. His crew is tasked with setting up sting operations that target disgruntled employees and vengeful exes seeking to hire a contract killer to solve their life problems. 

Apparently, contract killing is a growth industry in the laid-back Big Easy, despite the fact that the job description is a Pop Cult fantasy. As a montage of cinematic guns for hire unspools, Gary reminds us that the profession is the creation of pulp novelists and Hollywood screenwriters. Disappointingly, the hit man is a creature as mythological as the Yeti. Gary’s delivery of the bad news comes via the sine qua non of the film noir genre, a retrospective voice-over narration, though his flashback is not a confession gasped into a Dictaphone or spoken from a cell on death row, but emanates from… well, we’re not sure where exactly, but the guy seems upbeat, no patsy screwed over by fate or a female. 

As a mild-mannered and slovenly attired dweeb, Gary very much belongs in the surveillance van as a backup man, monitoring the real action from headphones. But when scuzzy undercover cop Jasper (Austin Amelio) gets suspended from the force for going viral with a beatdown of a teenage suspect (in his defense, Jasper notes that more than half of the online comments gave him a thumbs-up), Gary is pushed on stage, Ruby Keeler-like, to play the lead role of the hit man. Once in the spotlight, mutatis mutandis, Gary slips effortlessly into character as a stone-cold contract killer, conning the client (Mike Markoff, who looks more like a hit man than Gary) and surprising his two minority-group partners Phil (Sanjay Rao) and Claudette (Retta). 

The transformation from milquetoast to murderer occurs in the blink of an eye; character, it seems, is not permanent but fluid. The notion is teased out in a conversation Gary has with his ex-wife Alicia (Molly Bernard), who is also his bestie (unlike everyone else in New Orleans, he does not want to terminate his ex). Throughout Hit Man, the forward action is interrupted by scenes of Gary, in philosopher/professor mode, pondering questions of good and evil, justice and retribution—seeming digressions that are central to the film’s meaning. 

Fully committed to his new role, Gary expands his repertoire into a rogue’s gallery of familiar screen hit men, developing a Mission Impossible level of expertise in makeup, costuming, accents, and prosthetics. (It would be churlish to spoil all the fun, but my favorite is his imitation of Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho [2000], who is technically not a hit man but a serial killer.) Like his students, Gary always does his homework, researching the social media of a prospective client to tailor the hit man image to fit their expectations. An actor prepares. 

The disguise that will become his second skin is Ron—cool, confident, and perfectly outfitted—a persona he dons to lure in a foxy Latina client, Madison (Adria Arjona), an abused wife looking to whack her psycho husband. From their first shared piece of pie, the chemical spark between Ron and Madison (and actors Powell and Arjona) is electric—not sexual, as yet, but simpatico, the instant pheromonal link between two people surfing the same sensibility wavelength. [Spoiler Alert on what follows.] Smitten, Gary calls an audible and turns down the assignment. He tells her to walk away from the marriage rather than make herself a widow. Of course, Madison herself may be in disguise—damsel in distress or femme fatale? 

Casting professional ethics and the Kantian categorical imperative aside, Gary hooks up with Madison. The sexual heat quotient between the couple is high—not high by the standards of Body Heat (1981) or Basic Instinct (1991), but in an age in which intimacy coordinators seem to lurk off screen like Joe Breen timing the duration of a kiss, coming upon the on-screen sex play is like finding an erotic French postcard in the pages of a Victorian novel. Madison is turned on by Ron’s alpha-male lethality, which in turn, ups Ron’s—or is it Gary’s?—sexual game. 

Linklater has said the eroticism is the drug that fuels the reckless abandon of the couple outside the bedroom and in this, as usual, he hits his target. Since emerging on the scene with the Gen-X touchstones Slacker (1990) and Dazed and Confused (1993), the Austin-based director has accumulated as impressive a catalogue as any writer-director working in—but usually outside of—Hollywood, an eclectic menu that includes rotoscoped animation in Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006); the really long game played in Boyhood (2014), twelve years in the making; the beloved real time romantic trilogy Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013); and the mainstream hit School of Rock (2003), which Jack Black foresees as the film credit chiseled on his tombstone…

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Thomas Doherty, professor of American studies at Brandeis University, is author of numerous books on film.

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Cineaste, Vol.  XLIX, No. 4