Review: Hit Man

Director:  Richard Linklater

Stars:  Glen Powell, Adria Adjona, Retta

“Fake it ’til you make it” is an oft-touted kernel of blue-collar wisdom that might well appeal to Austin’s Richard Linklater, the stoner-jock who happened to become a filmmaker at just the right time for the indie boom of the early ’90s. His work has been characterised by breezy extensions of his own personality, from the anecdotal escapades of Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some!! to Ethan Hawke’s Jesse in the Before trilogy (clearly an avatar for the director himself, right down to the propensity for philosophical diatribe). But there’s always been a sense that Linklater never really intended this to be his career, he just turned out to be sorta good at it and- in a very Linklater way – it was cooler to just go with the flow.

The work, while varied and cannily ambitious, has maintained a steady, amiable glide. A comfortable speed close to cruising. 30+ years into an impressive career, it can be difficult to shake off stagnation, but Linklater tries, from the relatively experimental detours of his loose Rotoscope trilogy (Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly, Apollo 10½) to occasional flexes of genre and tone.

Following a particularly purple patch in the early ’10s (Bernie through Everybody Wants Some!!), his work seems to have drifted a little. His new Netflix offering Hit Man seems preoccupied with this, and while it is ostensibly one of those wink-wink “almost true” stories packaged as a brash ‘n’ breezy self-aware comedy, the real-world reflections might be more personal this time out.

Glen Powell (also co-writer and producer) stars as Gary Johnson, a nerdy philosophy teacher in New Orleans who stumbles into a second occupation as a fake hit man. Employed by the local PD to impersonate a contract killer, Gary is used to entrap those willing to pay big to make their problems go away. Amorphously questioning his own sense of self, Gary comes to enjoy putting on the clothes and accoutrements of his characters, indulging in their largess and confidence. Things get complicated when he falls for one of his suspects, a beautiful young woman named Madison (Adria Arjona) who seems genuinely frightened of her controlling husband.

After a dawdling, faltering opening section (pocked with a few awkward ‘waits for laugh’ montage moments), Hit Man moves into comfortable romcom territory for its middle act. It particularly comes alive whenever Powell and Arjona – who have great chemistry together – are left to spar on screen. It has a classic screwball Lie at it’s centre (Madison assumes Gary is ‘Ron’, the tough, dangerous hitman) and we’re lured into something like a false sense of security over how things will play out, emotionally. But just as Gary falters keeping up his charade with the woman he’s falling in love with, so Linklater seems ill-suited to the steamy, noirish elements that begin overtaking the picture.

He’s never made a sexy thriller before, and it kind of shows. Powell and Arjona have the magnetism, looks and star power to carry it off when needed, but Hit Man feels unsure of itself whenever these modes are requested. Linklater reverts to what he knows and feels comfortable with, and the result is an idiosyncratic picture, one that wants to be a bit hotter, a bit edgier, but which recedes to safer ground.

Buying Powell as an unsexy Jason Schwartzman/Jon Lajoie type is a bit of a stretch, but the movie’s playful tone accommodates the conceit, and its something of a joy to watch Gary step out of himself into Ron, for whom Powell switches on the movie-star eyes and one feels the picture lift. But the same sense of lift doesn’t occur in the film’s pacing or visual dynamism. It’s not as tight or punchy as something you might expect from lesser hacks like Craig Gillespie or Adam McKay. That’s not really Linklater’s temperament and his inclination is to stay true to himself. That urge really announces itself whenever we return to Gary at work as a teacher, scenes in which one feels Linklater flexing at his keyboard, drawing forth his keenness to philosophise, question and study.

Things really start to feel strange in the third act, when Powell and Linklater start contorting the narrative to fit a thematic arc (literally monologued to camera) about the nature of truth. Having masqueraded as a killer, Hit Man throws Gary into a situation where he may actually need to murder someone. The act itself is disarmingly detached and cruel, rendered more jarring when it is eclipsed in the frame by a scene of sexual arousal. The dichotomy is really unusual from this filmmaker, rendered all the more thorny by a line of (relatively small) text in the closing credits admitting that they made that bit up.

It does strange things for the picture as a whole. On the one hand, it plays into the thesis that there is no ‘one truth’. That the truth – like people – evolves, and that objectivity is just as transitory. On the other, it feels like it undoes the integrity of the whole. That Hit Man is just another ripped-from-the-headlines yarn rendered more entertaining for those stuck scrolling on Netflix for something to watch. That something sacrosanct has been in some way eroded or compromised.

But this isn’t a flat-out criticism either. Without that strangeness, that thorniness, Hit Man would have had a much shorter shelf-life after the credits rolled. Instead I’m still thinking on it, still considering it, still trying to fit it into the broader context of neo-noir, of romantic comedies, of Linklater.

Hit Man is a movie that starts out as one thing, before gamely trying on the fit of another. I’m not sure it particularly works – at least not all of the time – but I can respect the effort and inclination to fake it ’til you make it.