NYFF Review: Hit Man

Few filmmakers have as eclectic a catalogue as Richard Linklater. The trouble is, he’s not always successful. The director has made some of the most beloved coming of age and romance films of all time. Notably, however, he doesn’t fall under the auteur category, as some of his career choices bear next to no stylistic or thematic resemblance to others. For every Before entry, there’s a Me and Orson Welles. For every Days and Confused or Everybody Wants Some!!, there’s a Where’d You Go Bernadette. And now, there’s Hit Man, a crime rom com made to have mass appeal that’s as entertaining as it is smarmy. It, too, doesn’t feel much like anything Linklater has done before.

Loosely based on a true story pulled from a 2001 issue of Texas Monthly, Hit Man follows divorced nerdy college professor Gary Johnson (Glen Powell), whose part-time gig is as an undercover cop listening in as a wire-wearing colleague, Jasper (Austin Amelio), pretends to be a contract killer. The people who think they’re hiring him spill their guts, only to be shocked when police sirens immediately follow their meeting. But with Jasper suddenly absent from his duties, Gary is asked to step into the role. Turns out, he not only likes the thrill, but is exceedingly good at making people believe he’s a hitman.

At first, the film is mostly a vehicle for Powell, who also wrote the screenplay with Linklater. The first act takes on too breezy of a tone, the film’s comedy a little grating as it develops Gary’s confidence as a fake hitman. But once that confidence is achieved, Powell evokes a young Tom Cruise in his ability to command the screen with a wry yet clueless smile. Like his Top Gun: Maverick co-star in a great many of his films, Powell finds charm in his character’s unearned arrogance and being in over his head. A lot of the comedy lands, too, even as the script paints broad strokes with its humor (on more than one occasion, Powell is in a wig that the audiences is definitely supposed to know is a wig).

Things are going unrealistically smoothly until Gary meets Maddy (Adria Arjona), a beautiful and charming yet broken-hearted and vengeful woman hoping someone will kill her husband (Evan Holtzman) for her. As Gary convinces her not to hire him, the chemistry between Powell and Arjona is immediate, successful enough to build the rest of Hit Man around it. They start to see each other—something Gary hides from the police precinct—and Linklater shows us he still has a knack for developing a believable nothing-else-in-the-world-matters-now romance. There are cute meandering conversations right out of Before Sunset, and then lots of charged physical intimacy. (How refreshing it is for a such a seemingly commercially minded movie to be so sexy.)

But with all the narrative crumbs overtly in place, Hit Man isn’t subtle enough to be unpredictable there on out. The story goes where you expect it to, Powell and Arjona keeping it alive as it starts to feel like we’re going through the motions of a typical interpersonal crime story, albeit a comical one. It all generally works, just not in the most interesting way.

Then, as we’ll find out in the end credits, the film changes the true story it’s adapting in a way that misreads what these characters feel like they’re intended for. As Hit Man is ending, there’s an unshakable sourness to where Gary and Maddy end up that, when title cards tell us a major plot point didn’t actually happen, completely fails the film’s light and frothy tone. Generally enjoyable as the movie is, the ending feels lazy and not particularly well thought out. Were a less experienced filmmaker at the helm, it may go over easier. But when Linklater is at his most emotionally precise, there’s arguably no better director at sticking the landing. Sadly, that’s not the case here.