Let’s start by hanging an interrogation light over the elephant in the room: Hit Man is a movie with such indecently good sexual chemistry that a lesser professional might have temporarily misplaced a few finer points of the plot. I took notes. Some of them even concerned the screenplay.
But nobody has ever spent two hours this blissfully unaware of why they’re having so much fun and called it a problem. This flight may be too short for meal service, but it’s staffed by the world’s most tantalizing flight attendant and somehow gets lead Glen Powell exactly where he needed to go: wheels down, tray tables up, firmly parked on Hollywood’s A-list.
Powell, who trades his suspiciously movie-star-ready given name for his character’s aggressively nondescript moniker, Gary Johnson, isn’t so much the film’s lead as he is all twenty of its best supporting characters. Gary is a mild-mannered psychology professor who moonlights helping the police with surveillance operations until an absent undercover officer leaves him with an unexpected promotion: pretend to be a professional hit man long enough for would-be customers to incriminate themselves.
Gary discovers, to everyone’s surprise and especially his own, that he is extremely good at it.
What follows is essentially Glen Powell being handed an unlimited costume budget and permission to audition for every role he has ever wanted simultaneously. Gary tailors a different assassin to each client—slick sociopath, redneck lunatic, Eastern European menace, vaguely terrifying guy who looks like he knows exactly where to buy a crossbow at 2 a.m.—with wigs, accents, prosthetics and increasingly deranged wardrobe choices. The joke works because Powell commits hard enough that every new persona feels less like a disguise than another actor briefly hijacking the movie.
Underneath all that cosplay, Hit Man is a coming-of-age story about a man who appears to have reached the age where nothing else is coming for him. Gary teaches philosophy, feeds his cats, observes human behavior and seems perfectly content living a life whose pulse could comfortably be monitored with a sundial. Playing dangerous men gives him access to qualities he normally only lectures about: confidence, spontaneity, desire and the apparently transformative power of owning a shirt that fits properly.
Then Madison walks in.
Played by Adria Arjona, who cannot be adequately described by anyone whose mouth is hanging this decidedly open, Madison arrives looking to hire one of Gary’s invented killers—Ron—to murder her controlling husband. Gary breaks protocol, talks her out of it, and should logically disappear from her life forever.
Instead, he makes the tactical error of being Glen Powell around Adria Arjona.
The resulting relationship is built atop the minor complication that Madison believes Gary is a professional assassin named Ron, while Gary discovers that pretending to be Ron may actually be making him more like the person he wants to become. This is approximately where the movie stops politely observing genre boundaries and begins driving across the median.
It’s a romantic comedy. It’s a noir. It’s a crime movie. It’s a philosophical argument about identity. It’s occasionally a sex comedy in which the principal special effect is two people looking at each other. And once Gary’s invented identity begins colliding with Madison’s increasingly complicated reality, Hit Man starts stacking lies atop lies with the structural integrity of a Jenga tower at closing time.
The movie feels perpetually about thirty seconds away from going completely out of control and then lands, masterfully, just before the audience finishes acclimating to having the spins. Richard Linklater has spent a career making this kind of tonal high-wire act look suspiciously easy. On paper, Hit Man sounds like the sort of movie somebody greenlights after combining five different successful Netflix thumbnails. In Linklater’s hands, it feels effortless, specific and enormously alive.
That effortlessness may be the trick. Streaming libraries are now packed floor-to-ceiling with movies possessing bigger budgets, louder explosions, more recognizable intellectual property and roughly one-eighth this much personality. Hit Man has Powell changing wigs, Arjona changing the room temperature, a wonderfully elastic premise and enough confidence to leave before anyone starts checking their watch.
It is sexy without becoming stupid, clever without congratulating itself for being clever, and absurd without ever severing the tiny thread connecting the whole thing to reality. Most importantly, it understands a principle Hollywood has recently treated as classified information: a movie can simply be a f*cking blast.
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