Hit Man: Richard Linklater’s Identity Crisis

MOVE INFO:

Oscar-nominated director Richard Linklater’s sunlit neo-noir stars Glen Powell as strait-laced professor Gary Johnson, who moonlights as a fake hit man for the New Orleans Police Department. Preternaturally gifted at inhabiting different guises and personalities to catch hapless people hoping to bump off their enemies, Gary descends into morally dubious territory when he finds himself attracted to one of those potential criminals, a beautiful young woman named Madison (Adria Arjona). As Madison falls for one of Gary’s hit man personas — the mysteriously sexy Ron — their steamy affair sets off a chain reaction of play acting, deception, and escalating stakes.

REVIEW:

Hit Man is Richard Linklater’s screwball thriller cum noir about the unlikeliest under cover agent/ murderer for hire. The movie is based on a 2001 Texas Monthly article about Gary Johnson, a part time college professor who works for the New Orleans Police Department as a tech consultant helping to make recordings of murder for hire sting operations, who is recruited to be a faux hitman when the veteran cop who was doing the gig gets suspended for bad behavior and they need a replacement pronto.

Gary is played by Glenn Powell who has an offbeat leading man vibe. Powell plays Gary as an eager dweeb, a loner, divorced dude, who is content living with his plants and cats, and molding young minds on Jung and Nietzsche. He’s the kind of brainy chatterbox that Linklater likes to feature in his movies. When Gary discovers his hitman talent, which heavily echoes the Hollywood versions, he becomes what he is playing- cool, hard, mean, almost psychopathic. In essence, Gary is acting out the movies in his mind, and his targets are honing in on those pop culture references as a genuine true reality. He’s a fiction of a fiction, a mythology of a mythology.

Linklater allows Powell to go through the whole panoply of Hollywood hitman personas. He wears disguises: scars, tattoos,beards, wigs, hats, different cigars, even assorted Russian accents. Powell is at his chameleonic, virtuoso best playing these characters. These performances are Hit Man highlight. They’re a Best Actor nominating reel.

When Gary meets Madison, the vibrantly saucy Ariana Arjona, a forlorn beauty who wants to kill her abusive, dirtbag husband, Hit Man steers into a noir romantic comedy. Gary’s pretending to be so cocksure, laidback and latently hot makes him becomes sexy to her and they fall in love. Add the machinations of a jealous and vengeful husband and there is the noir. Gary and his murderous persona will collide, constantly get in the way of there good and bad motivations, and eventually, awakwardly resolve when the real truth comes out.

Hit Man focus on self identity will veer it occasionally to the self conscious. That’s not a major flaw. It constantly moves and morph, never has time to settle long.