Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase “the banality of evil,” popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as “This Gun for Hire” (1942) and “Murder by Contract” (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil. The hired gunman in Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 short story “The Killers”—who, when asked “What’s the idea?,” answers, “There isn’t any idea”—is a primordial counterpart to the guard in Auschwitz who told the inmate Primo Levi, “Here there is no why.” Instead of filling in these blanks, filmmakers have tended to welcome them. Thus, like the movie Nazi, the hit man has become so emptied of substance as to be, with rare exceptions, a ponderous cliché—a deadly bore.
A prime virtue of Richard Linklater’s new film, “Hit Man,” is that it features no hit man. Rather, it’s centered on a character who portrays a hit man—an actor, in a sense, albeit one whose masquerade has nothing to do with entertainment. Linklater, faced with a plethora of precursors and stereotypes, leans into them with a diabolically smart yarn about illusion and imagination—less the psychology of the hit man than the psychology of the myth of the hit man. His comedic approach gets deeper into the archetype, by way of mere talk about violence, than many similar movies do with the grim depiction of gore. What’s more, the film is also a romantic comedy, among the cleverest and most resonant recent examples of the genre.
“Hit Man” is loosely based on a true story: a 2001 report in Texas Monthly by Skip Hollandsworth about a professor in Houston named Gary Johnson who, in 1989, started working with local police on a peculiar basis. In the movie, which updates the action to the present day and transplants it to New Orleans, Gary (played by Glen Powell, who also wrote the script with Linklater) is a chipper, nerdy thirtysomething professor of philosophy and psychology, a cat person and a bird-watcher who also enjoys tinkering with electronics. This skill has led the police department to enlist his help in operating surveillance equipment. During a sting operation to arrest someone who is trying to hire a hit man, two officers inform him that the policeman who was to pose as the assassin has just been suspended for misconduct, and they hastily urge Gary to take his place.
Meeting with his prospective client, Gary instantly delights in the act of deception, thanks to what he characterizes in a wry voice-over as a professional fascination with “the eternal mystery of human consciousness and behavior.” He proves to be a quick study, deftly tailoring his hit manner to win the mark’s confidence. Exhorting himself to “think hit-man thoughts,” he impersonates a killer with devastating effectiveness. Gary’s new colleagues, listening from the van, are astonished at his transformation into an aggressive criminal, capable of regaling the mark with elaborate and absurdly gruesome descriptions of how he’ll dispose of the body.
The scene, which runs seven minutes, unfolds Gary’s improvised persona with a breezy virtuosity energized by Powell’s focussed enthusiasm. It also underlines the crucial role that the experience will quickly come to play in Gary’s life. The professor takes to his part-time undercover work, and a police sergeant says that he has a better conviction rate than his predecessor did. Gary is galvanized by the power of psychological manipulation—and by the awakening of the long-suppressed multitudes that he contains. Studying accents and makeup on YouTube, he applies temporary tattoos, stains his teeth, crafts faux scars, and dons wigs to create distinctive personalities—a black-clad Eastern European, a buttoned-down businessman, a folksy skeet shooter—that he thinks will loosen suspects’ tongues.
Then one sting goes wrong, and yet all too right. Gary goes to a restaurant to meet a woman named Madison Figueroa Masters (Adria Arjona), who wants to pay him to kill her abusive husband. After consulting her social-media profiles and police records, Gary decides to slick back his floppy hair and present himself as a suave charmer named Ron. But Gary falls in love with Madison at first sight, and, in a tautly written scene of flirtation, their meeting rapidly comes to resemble a date. Knowing the fate that awaits Madison just outside the door if she agrees to go through with the deal, Gary—or, rather, Ron—dissuades her from hiring him. Though his colleagues are listening in with bewilderment, they’re also wowed by the seductive character he creates. When Madison texts “Ron” for an actual date, Gary can’t resist, and they quickly become a couple, albeit with unusual boundaries. Madison believes that her new boyfriend is a hit man who carefully compartmentalizes his life to keep a low profile, and Gary delights in the brashly confident persona that he gets to inhabit. (Even his students notice a change in his personality.) But coincidences abound on city streets, and, when Gary is seen with Madison, suspicions arise. The liaison soon gets riskier still, when Madison’s husband turns up dead.
Linklater’s direction keeps “Hit Man” brisk and jazzy, as does the jovial force of Powell’s performance. Gary’s self-deprecating personality emerges most potently in voice-overs, addressed to the audience, in which he riffs on the idiosyncrasies of law enforcement, the psychology of his felonious clients, the ins and outs of his academic ruminations, and the peculiarity of his situation: Is he the bait or the prey? (“I was having sex with someone who was clearly capable of having a lover killed,” he reflects.) Arjona, vigorously conveying a survivor’s desperation and a romantic adventurer’s impulsiveness, matches Powell beat for beat, feint for feint, and the two generate a subtle yet charged chemistry. Powell—a Texan, like Linklater—got his first major movie role in the director’s largely autobiographical comedy “Everybody Wants Some!!” (2016), playing a swaggering, athletic intellectual of high-flown patter. In “Hit Man,” Linklater again endows Powell with both fast-talking high-mindedness and bravado, but here he makes the unlikely connection of those traits the subject of the film.
“Hit Man” revolves around the extent to which Gary’s portrayal of Ron threatens to take over his identity, and, early on, there’s a poignant dramatic exposition of the source of Gary’s drive to impersonate. While teaching a class involving “personality, self, and consciousness,” he notices a visitor in the back of the classroom: his ex-wife, Alicia (Molly Bernard). They chat afterward, and it’s clear that they still have a meaningful friendship, but it’s also hinted that she ended the marriage because of his failure to connect. Behind a mask of bonhomie, he is inexpressive, even impersonal, nerdily caught up in upbeat runs of off-kilter reflections. (At one point, he mentions that overthinking has also made him something of a dud in bed.) But in the bittersweet, if cerebral, intimacy of his chat with Alicia, she tells him about new research that suggests the ease with which, with a little coaching, people can quickly but drastically change their personalities. That chat shivers with premonitions of the perverse erotic bond that will soon unite Madison and Gary—a woman who wants her husband killed and the man she hopes will make it happen.
When Gary gets together with Madison while in the guise of Ron, I was reminded of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.” There, James Stewart plays a former police detective who falls desperately in love with a woman who turns out to be role-playing as part of a criminal scheme—and, even after discovering her ruse, he remains obsessed with the illusion that she created. In “Hit Man,” Linklater and Powell stand the notion on its head, with Gary creating a persona that does more than attract a woman he loves—with his impersonation, he also unleashes his own long-inhibited virility. This game of multilayered deceptions finds a climactic embodiment in an antic yet explosively tense scene, in which Gary puts his cell phone to exceptional, imaginative use in an effort to deflect suspicion about the clandestine relationship and to keep it beyond the reach of the law.
“Hit Man” proceeds with enticing rapidity, but, by the same token, rushes through Gary’s actorly transformations and races past his backstory, omitting details that would deepen his character. (For instance, the real-life Johnson, who died in 2022, was a Vietnam War veteran.) And, in the haste to wrap things up, the movie’s dénouement falls back on clichés; near the end, the script pushes the takeover of identity by imitation to an absurdly artificial extreme. Yet the moment is also symbolically significant—and its symbolism reaches far beyond the notion of ambient evil to illuminate the reckless passions that an intense sexual relationship comprises and the dangerous vulnerability that a romantic bond entails. Linklater, a longtime master of many genres, is perhaps most celebrated for the romantic dramas of his “Before” trilogy, which famously build the protagonists’ attraction largely through conversation; the talk in “Hit Man,” which conveys the twisted fury of desire, makes this film a far more satisfying and substantial love story. ♦
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