When you think of the modern hitman movie (at least over the last 10 years), your mind is likely to wander over to John Wick and all its many imitators, and maybe not to Richard Linklater, whose talky, improv-heavy hangout movies mostly find their joys in the beautiful mundane. Yet, with Hit Man, he and his latest star/muse Glen Powell manage to combine these two disparate worlds to airy, funny, charming, and just damn entertaining effect in a bouncy romcom that’s not nearly as murderous as its title may imply.
Very loosely based on a true story, Powell (who also serves as co-writer) takes on the role of Gary Johnson, a mild-mannered psychology professor at a New Orleans university with a unique side-hustle: working undercover for the local police as a fake contract killer, securing confessions from strangers desperate enough to want someone murdered for a fee. Every ‘client’ has a different fantasy in their head of a hitman, so Gary gets to become a whole host of killers, from a bro-y MAGA guy to a blunt Russian to a British assassin that is basically just Powell doing an excellent impression of Tilda Swinton.
It’s a heap of fun watching Gary and, by extension, Powell try all these roles on for size, but the one that really sticks is Ron. Basically just a more confident, aggressive version of Gary, Ron is the costume he puts on to meet Madison (Adria Arjona), who wants her abusive husband out of the picture. Naturally, Gary (as Ron) falls hard for Madison almost immediately, crossing the professional boundary to, instead of nabbing another conviction, encourage her to take her murder-fund money and use it to escape and build another life for herself.
It’s advice she follows, but she can’t get enough of this kind yet dangerous stranger, and soon Hit Man has moved into high-stakes romcom territory, as Gary attempts to juggle his and Ron’s lives so that he can be with Madison without letting the law complicate matters. Powell and Arjona are just fantastic together – if there are a few moments where Hit Man slows down a bit, it’s their chemistry that keeps it particularly compelling, a dynamic that only gets more entertaining as circumstances get more and more ridiculous. A particularly grand sequence involving a wire, suspicious cops, and frantic two-way improv is just a delight, Powell cementing his status as a real *star* while Arjona gives easily the greatest performance of her career.
Even by Linklater standards, Hit Man is feather-light, not matching the romantic majesty of the Before trilogy or the huge laughs of Everybody Wants Some, but that’s sometimes still more than enough (though its purchase by Netflix, ensuring that pretty much nobody will see it in the sort of large crowd a comedy like this plays best in, is a bummer). A cheerful and undemanding date night movie, performed by actors on absolutely scorching form, it asks for little and gives plenty in return.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 