A versatile hit man

Director Richard Linklater thrives at documenting the offbeat and odd, and his new movie Hit Man is no exception. A twisted rom-com about what happens when you’re too good at pretending to be someone else, the film is loosely based on the true story of a Houston psychology teacher who pretended to be a contract killer for police sting operations. (The journalist Skip Hollandsworth, dean of Texas crime reporting, set down that story in a 2001 magazine article; Hollandsworth’s work also inspired Bernie, Linklater’s 2011 film about a Texas town shaken by the news that a genuinely nice local man may have murdered a rich widow.) Hit Man is a witty, diverting, and clever caper, even as it sometimes seems like Linklater has chosen to elevate the surface-level quirkiness of the material over deeper ideas or artistic risks.

Linklater has carved a career as an indie auteur known for shaggy, seemingly formless films driven by characters, conversations, and settings more than by conventional plots. His first film, Slacker (1990), was a dry and dazzling composite portrait of the Austin, Texas, counterculture at a time when Austin was still, in fact, “weird.” It followed a series of constantly shifting characters, spending no more than a few minutes with any one person. Many of his other best-known films have had a similar allergy to convention: 1993’s Dazed and Confused, a cult classic about high school students in 1970s Texas, had recognizable character threads but no three-act structure to speak of. And Before Sunrise (1995), which was followed by two sequels, took the form of an extended conversation between a man and a woman who meet by chance on a European train.

By comparison, Hit Man is one of Linklater’s most conventional works. It is nimble, if not groundbreaking or even especially memorable. Glen Powell, better known for generic-white-guy supporting roles in films like Top Gun: Maverick, gets a star turn as Gary Johnson, a mild-mannered New Orleans man who works as a law enforcement surveillance technician and teaches psychology at a local college. (For some reason, the film transports the story to Louisiana.) As portrayed by Powell — who also co-wrote the film with Linklater — Gary is geeky, bordering on a nebbish. He’s divorced, lives alone with two cats, and bores his colleagues with his stories about birding.

Then that changes. A police officer (Austin Amelio) who was supposed to go undercover in a sting operation is suspended from duty, so Gary agrees, very reluctantly, to act as pinch hitter. The operation calls on him to pretend to be a contract killer, meet a man who wants his ex murdered, and get the man to incriminate himself on tape. Thanks in part to his understanding of psychology, Gary turns out to be a natural — to the surprise of himself, his colleagues (Retta, of Parks and Recreation, and Sanjay Rao), and his sinister yet dimwitted mark.

“Hit men,” the film notes, don’t really exist. The idea that there is a profession of customer-facing contract murderers is a myth from movies and television, but an unsettling number of Americans — jealous ex-boyfriends, restless trophy wives, life insurance beneficiaries, embittered business partners — badly want to believe that they exist. Gary’s breakthrough is understanding that every person seeking a hit man’s services has a different image of what the ideal hit man might look like. His genius is his ability to transform himself accordingly through makeup, wigs, clothing, attitude, and accent.

This is one of the film’s delights. It’s also an area where Powell, as a versatile, blandly good-looking everyman actor — handsome but not exactly Cary Grant, skilled but maybe no Daniel Day-Lewis — really shines. We watch Powell, as Gary, nail a number of greedy would-be murderers, each time surfacing different alter egos: a Russian-accented thug, a suited and suave corporate killer, a survivalist redneck, a tall, British-accented eccentric with a resemblance to Tilda Swinton. (A similarly funny running gag concerns the contortions to which Gary, who is a terrible shot, goes to avoid having to demonstrate his marksmanship to any potential clients.)

Gary realizes that these stings are, at heart, about seduction and fantasy. (In fact, the film alludes to the fact that some of these operations may come dangerously close to entrapment.) His skills of seduction accidentally turn literal when he meets Madison, played by the well-cast Puerto Rican actress Adria Arjona. Madison, who believes Gary is a seasoned hit man named “Ron,” wants him to murder her abusive and controlling husband. Gary, who feels bad for her, talks her out of the hit and into leaving the husband. But their interaction doesn’t end there. Sparks have flown. Powell and Arjona have great chemistry, and their lusty relationship has genuine eroticism in a way that many films these days don’t. Gary’s double-life is now doubly complicated.

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Is Madison a victim, a femme fatale, or some mixture of both? And how will she react when she learns that the sexy and deadly “Ron” is an elaborate fraud? From this, the broad and somewhat banal farce of the first half of the movie shifts into more of a suspenseful dark comedy. Linklater has, in effect, updated a classic noir dilemma for the age of smartphones and social media; the result is a kind of Double Indemnity for millennials, but with a happier ending and more punches pulled.

Hit Man is great fun. It also, perhaps, benefits from a grading curve, simply because it is more interesting and skillful than the average film churned out by Netflix and its peers. Linklater’s decision to play the material as mostly conventional comedy works for what it is, but also feels like a slight cop-out. The film has a sitcom’s unreality, at times, and demands some suspension of disbelief; the law enforcement scenes in particular feel like something from Brooklyn Nine-Nine. I enjoyed Hit Man, even as I couldn’t quite shake the sense that there was a darker, more subtle, and maybe more persuasive film underneath.

J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.