Hit Man

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 jumps into this by trading his suspiciously movie-star-ready given name for his character’s nondescript moniker, Gary Johnson. Gary is a total bore of a psych professor who side gigs as an assistant to the local police. Normally, he just sits in the van and helps with surveillance operations until one day a missing undercover officer leaves him with an unexpected promotion and he gets to step into the sudden opening. The task? Pretend to be a professional hit man.

After giving it a shot, Gary discovers—to everyone’s surprise and particularly his own—that he is incredibly good at it.

And once everyone discovers that Gary Johnson is not just an undercover officer but an undercover artist, the movie gets to break into a montage of essentially just Glen Powell being handed the SNL costume warehouse and permission to revenge act in every role he never got over the last decade.

Gary must work up a little custom-spec assassin for everyone he tries to sell his shooting/stabbing services to, and so Powell gets to take them all out for a spin.

We get the hair gel enthusiast sociopath, the ‘hell yeah brother’ lunatic, and the super-fidgety, definitely-on-meth guy who looks like he knows exactly where to buy a crossbow at 2 a.m. The middle act works because Powell commits hard enough that every new persona feels less like a disguise than it does another mentally deranged supporting actor coming in to join the entourage.

Unfurling alongside all that cosplay, Hit Man develops into a coming-of-age story about a man who appears to have reached the age where nothing else is coming for him. Gary, at his most intriguing, larps as a psych prof and owns goddamn cats. Playing dangerous men gives him access to virtues he normally only lectures his students about. He's now got confidence, spontaneity, desire and the absolute superpower 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. But Gary, already smitten, breaks protocol and talks her out of it.

Afterwards, he 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, of course, atop that little fib at the outset that Madison believes Gary is a professional assassin named Ron. The whole affair develops just as much as an exercise in self-discovery as it does in the getting to know someone new. Gary discovers that pretending to be Ron may be making him more like the person he wants to become. But this transition towards Ron and away from Gary becomes tricky once his newly-invented fake persona begins colliding with Madison’s established real life and from there Hit Man starts stacking lies atop lies with the structural integrity of a Jenga tower at last call.

From there, the movie and Gary’s transition into Ron feel perpetually about thirty seconds away from going completely out of control. But the film sticks the landing just before the audience gets used to having the spins, making the leap of faith feel earned. Gary may feel like a fraud as Ron, but Madison is quicker to recognize the man he’s been working up the nerve to become. Turns out the only person who couldn’t buy the new Gary was the old one, who’d made reinvention sound a hell of a lot harder from behind a lectern.

Richard Linklater has spent a career making this kind of tonal high-wire act look suspiciously easy. On paper, Hit Man sounds sort of like a beef stew of a bunch of shit that streaming services have thrown at the fan in the past without it ending in disaster. In Linklater’s hands, it feels effortless, specific and enormously alive.

That effortlessness is the whole magic show. Streaming libraries are now packed floor-to-ceiling with movies possessing maximum starpower, maximum explosions, maximally overused intellectual property and roughly one-eighth this much personality. Hit Man has Powell changing wigs, Arjona changing the room temperature, a wonderfully variable premise and enough confidence to leave before anyone starts checking their watch.

It is sexy without becoming stupid and corny, clever without taking a feature-length victory lap for being clever, and absurd without depriving the movie of a place to land with sincerity. Most importantly, it understands a principle Hollywood has recently treated as classified information.

A movie can simply be a fucking blast.