The creative partnership between Glen Powell and Richard Linklater is as exciting as it is underrated. Years before Powell was being hailed one of the hot new actors in Hollywood he appeared in a memorable supporting role in Everybody Wants Some!! (prior to this, as a teenager he had a small part in Fast Food Nation). Post-Top Gun: Maverick he made a small appearance in Apollo 10½, and then it was announced he was co-writing and starring in Linklater’s next film. The pair clearly share a common artistic and intellectual sensibility, of a kind comparable to Linklater and his other great collaborator Ethan Hawke. And their film Hit Man is really an ideal embodiment of that -funny and thoughtful as much as it is charming and sexy.
I can’t think of a more sexually evocative movie that Linklater has made in fact. His Before trilogy is of course a pinnacle of cinematic romance, but it’s much more lush and tender than lustful and sensual as several scenes of Hit Man are. And yet that isn’t the impression one might get from what this movie’s premise is.
It is based loosely on an article written for Texas Monthly by Skip Hollandsworth, a friend of Linklater’s with whom he wrote Bernie, about a man named Gary Johnson who worked as a mole for the New Orleans police department by masquerading as various types of hit men to catch criminals. Aside from the work and how he went about it, very little of Johnson’s life seems to have been adapted for the movie, with Linklater and Powell merely using it as a springboard for a love story revolving around deceptive identities.
In co-writing this script, Powell gives himself a lot of opportunities to play and demonstrate his range -and perhaps his best showcase of this is as a nerdy criminology professor at a local college whose chief hobby is birding. This is the ‘real’ Gary Johnson, who supplements himself with a side gig doing tech work for the police. He is thrown into a situation of playing the hit man himself though when the department’s regular mole Jasper (Austin Amelio -another one of the guys from Everybody Wants Some!!) is suspended for inappropriate behaviour on duty. Overcoming some initial nervousness, it goes rather well for Gary, who starts adopting a variety of hit men personas tailored to the perps the force is looking to catch. Things get a bit complicated though when he finds himself romantically drawn to a suspect Madison (Adria Arjona), as well as the smooth, mysterious and confident character of Ron whom she knows him as.
Though his work in the script is certainly laudable, Powell’s performance is probably the film’s greatest strength. For years now he’s been acclaimed for his seemingly natural screen charisma and classically masculine charms, and Hit Man may well be the best showcase of them, while also allowing him to play to some other strengths of comedy and even character acting. Many of the one-scene characters Gary takes on are broad fantasies of hit men, as he emphasizes repeatedly (the movie makes a point that hit men as a profession are entirely fictitious). But they give him the chance to experiment in persona to effective, and often funny ends. Identity is a key theme of the movie, the ways in which it is projected and utilized, and Powell takes that material seriously, even if not some of the characters. Gary and Ron however are finely distinct and respectively believable. A little bit of one is always there in the other, and Powell knows how to let the audience in on that subtlety.
In Gary, he epitomizes the platonic ideal of a Linklater character, especially in his vocation as a teacher; but in Ron he plays to perfection the fantasy of both Madison and the audience quite honestly. The right kind of saviour for a woman looking to strike out against an abusive husband. But Madison also seems happy to represent a kind of fantasy as well -though not as a character; she lets her personality be transformed by the presence of Ron. Through the affair, their dalliance plays like a steamy romance novel your aunt might read: a cool and charming hit man seducing the neglected housewife and fulfilling her pent-up sexual urges. And credit to Linklater, Powell, and Arjona -they illustrate exactly why those stories are so popular. The actors' relate a pronounced chemistry coloured by deeply raw erotic undertones. From their first meeting, which they forget at one point isn't a date, they are ready to jump into bed together. And even as "Ron" manipulates her through his false identity, their compatibility is undeniable, lust and euphemism underlining their talk and body language across every interaction, with a decent degree of danger thrown in as 'Ron' ironically brings out more of Madison's twisted side.
As expected, some great, occasionally dark humour arises out of this, especially once both Madison's jilted ex and Jasper enter the picture, and Gary's two identities are forced to overlap. For him it's a con, for her it's clearly the extension of a shady, impulsive repression -though Arjona never betrays the truth of her convictions. And at her heart is a commitment to the fantasy and a love of the thrill of it. Its culmination is a brilliant scene of her and Gary duping his superiors through spontaneous improvisation-and the way the panic for both of them slips into a sultry verbal dance -that also captures a curious sexual appeal to performance- is exhilarating. The most fun and satisfying beat of the movie.
Through the intensity and sexual exuberance of the film, Hit Man still possesses that quintessential Linklater breeziness. For being set in New Orleans, it's a very low-key, evenly paced movie that sticks close to suburban environments or quaint institutions like the college. It's got very little of the kind of action that might normally be expected for such a title, subverting another generic fantasy as Linklater reserves his interest for the characters and the novelty of the premise. And a lot of the humour has that charm of quirky authenticity that characterizes so many of his other movies. The glimpses of each of Gary's characters are only half as amusing as the bizarre people they interact with (including an angry teenager trying to put a hit out on his mum). They are observational figures and quite often hilarious.
But I don't want to undersell Powell's contributions, which are significant and give the film its own flavour distinct from Linklater's usual themes and impressions. Hit Man is a delightful movie, curious in its discussion of the identities we create for ourselves, riveting in its general conceit and the opportunities it gives to its actors, who are enticingly charismatic as they engage in a fantastically sizzling romance. This creative pair really do work impeccably together and I hope to see their collaborations continue even as Powell graduates to mainstream stardom.
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