Hit Man

dir: Richard Linklater

2024

I don’t always find myself wondering why a plethora of critics fall over themselves praising a particular movie, because I can usually see the reason. It might be lazy, simplistic reasoning, but I can usually grasp it.

The incredible reviews for this flick, being Hit Man, leave me somewhat perplexed, but in a way that shouldn’t indicate I care that much. I don’t think it really matters, and in a few months no-one will even remember this film unless someone involved goes on an actual kill crazy rampage (which, these people being in the States, is not an impossibility, in fact it’s constitutionally required).

The main statement I’ve seen about this flick is that it heralds leading man Glen Powell with his arrival at some sort of apex level of success or stardom, and, honestly, why do people continue to talk like this? That kind of promotional bullshit should have died a long time ago, long before covid, long before OJ killed his ex-wife and her partner. These people are not our friends.

These relentless shitbags are in it for money and fame. Praising someone to the heavens so that he can become the next Tom Cruise is not something worth doing, unless you get rid of the previous one.

If he were a major acting talent, maybe you could justify all that bullshit, but, I’ve seen him in two films thus far, and as far as I can tell he read his lines well and doesn’t appear drunk on set. That’s not a justification for crowning him the next King of Moomba or anything.

He plays a character here based on a real life person, someone who existed, being Gary Johnson, who was a Vietnam vet who came back not too fucked up and taught psych and philosophy at a New Orleans university. I’m suspecting it wasn’t a great university if he was teaching both, because…

Anyway, very boring Gary we know is boring because he has square-rimmed metal framed glasses. The students in his classes are generally bored, and the female students don’t find him attractive. You may think I’m reaching with this, but I am not, I assure you the film makes it literal. Anyway, he somehow also moonlights as a technician with the New Orleans pigs, helping their undercover people record conversations all the better to convict them with.

You see, there is apparently no such thing as a hitman. They don’t exist.

Shocking, I know, I can’t believe it either. Ninety per cent of the films that come out are about an aging hitman wanting to get out of the game but being forced to do one last hit etc etc and then having to kill a thousand other hitpeople. But apparently all of that is a myth.

Of course there are people who commit murders. Of course there are crims that commit murders, after being ordered to by their bosses etc. But the idea that there’s a person whose job it is to get random calls from members of the public who would then go on to kill someone for money, is a myth.

It’s a myth that the cops seem to delight in propagating, because it means they can entrap the people who would otherwise be too cowardly to do it themselves, and then send them to jail.

When an absolute fucking horrifying jerk of a cop falls sick, Gary is dragooned into pretending to be the hitman at a meet up with the ‘client’. His job is to convince the jerk or jerkette that he can do the job, get them to explicitly call for the crime to be committed on tape, and then exchange money.

I guess that’s not a simple job, because this fucking movie pretends that the blossoming that occurs for Gary is as a result of this being the most complex, nuanced, exacting job in the world. Forget being a surgeon, or an air traffic controller: convincing shitty people to go with their shitty desires, that’s the real deal.

I mean, honestly. Spare me this bullshit. He puts on a lot of costumes, and pretends a lot of different backstories, but he’s still the same dull piece of shit at the end as he is in the beginning.

I don’t see the transformation, I honestly don’t. Later on in the film two of his uni students, female of course, turn to each other and say “when did our teacher get so hot?” and I honestly rolled my eyes so hard I think I dislocated something in my brain.

I’m not implying Powell puts in a bad performance, not at all. Even knowing that this is based on a real person, it just never felt that believable to me, because tonally, the film tries to have its cake and fuck it too.

It goes from being the wish-fulfilment fantasy of someone going from a nobody to somebody just because he adopts a persona, to a fucking idiotic tone-deaf romantic comedy. I kid you not. There’s a clear delineation where the flick obviously departs from the “official” story, once Gary, or should I say Ron, falls in love with a woman who wants her husband killed.

This section, and this whole thing clearly worked for other people. For me, if I thought what came before was naff, well, this whole blancmange of bullshit just struck me as preposterous.

Madison (Adria Arjona) wants to hire Ron to kill her abusive husband, but Gary chooses to convince her not to hire him because…Because he doesn’t want to see her arrested and hopes he can have sex with her, that’s all I can figure out. She doesn’t get arrested, and months later he gets his chance to bang her. Hurray! Well done, you had sex with a woman!

She still thinks he’s a hitman, so when they bump into her ex-husband, she still thinks he’s still capable of taking care of things.

Now, I’m not a relationship expert, by any means. I have heard enough to know that if your sexual / romantic partner thinks you kill people for money, or for kicks, or because the 8th house of Aquarius is in retrograde and the dark voices command you to make more sacrifices, then that person is probably a terrible piece of shit too. And if you’re not actually said killer, then it’s hardly a basis for an honest and open meeting of the minds.

At the very least it means they’re both terrible pieces of shit.

But imagine if the screenplay has a solution for this, and makes it almost mandatory for them to kill people in order to prove their deep love for each other…

“Commitment”, Gary will say pretentiously, at one crucial moment, when he decides to prove his love to her.

Bleurgh. Fuck this film. I ain’t buying this bullshit at all. I’m all for watching films where attractive people get together but all of this felt so contrived, and beyond implausible.

Plenty of other people disagreed, though, so maybe I’m just limited in some way.

Hit Man is not good, not at all. It thinks it’s clever, and it’s just weak sauce instead. And I say that practically as a lifelong fan of this director. A handful of his films are some of my favourites, ever. And a lot of his others are at least films that I have a lot of time for.

I’d rather put a plastic bag over my head and tie it off before ever watching this again.

5 times those are some of the most gullible cops I’ve ever seen in the movies out of 10

--
“Seize the identity you want for yourself” – so empowering - Hit Man