This was supposed to be the summer of Glen Powell, and his most notable play for the A-list is the film he stars in and co-wrote with Richard Linklater, "Hit Man." It's loosely based on the life of Gary Johnson, an unassuming college professor who was secretly helping out law enforcement by playing a fake hit man in undercover operations. Powell gets to dress up in fun disguises and put on different personas. He transforms from a nerdy academic to a confident stud over the course of the story, helped out by his romance with a desperate woman, Madison, played by Adria Arjona. He's in practically every scene, and uses the time to make the case that he's ready to be America's new favorite leading man.
And Powell mostly won me over, though with a few misgivings. Similarly, "Hit Man" won me over, though the too-tidy resolution left me a little shell-shocked. I give Linklater and Powell all due credit for setting up a fun, watchable romance, and the two leads certainly have chemistry. "Hit Man" mostly follows the usual template of a caper movie, playing with mistaken identity and secret relationship tropes in a very lighthearted way. However, when it comes to the film shifting gears to something more serious in the last act, I didn't quite buy the big twists. Some of this is due to the performances - Adria Arjona is fine up to the point where she has to be potentially threatening, which doesn't really work. Powell's better about getting Gary's thought processes across, except in that crucial final moment, where we find out if the hit man is really just a part he's playing. I'm not sure if the resulting tonal clashes were deliberate or if I'm overthinking things.
Spoilers ahead in this paragraph. Gary and Madison getting a picture perfect happy ending in spite of doing some awful things is meant to be dissonant to an extent, but probably not to the extent that I found it. On the one hand the story is a fictionalized account of a real person's life, and we know that the final act was completely made up to inject some sensationalism. The credits even point this out! On the other hand, this feels like a very odd way for Linkater to be doing any kind of self-reflective commentary on the artifice required for happy endings in this kind of crime-based rom-com. There are definitely better ways to get this idea across, and I wonder if "Hit Man" would have been better as a Steven Soderbergh project instead of a Richard Linklater one. Or did I just not get the joke about Gary embracing a role that we know from the outset is a fantasy?
In any case, "Hit Man" is a solid piece of filmmaking. It's very low budget and lacks a lot of the niceties you'd expect from studio productions, but I hardly noticed their absence. Because Gary is a fake hit man, violence is only alluded to and mostly happens offscreen. However, Linklater is good at keeping the momentum going and the tension high. The high point of the film is a fantastic scene involving Powell, Arjona, and the iPhone Notes app, as they try to keep their stories straight during a staged confrontation. The timing is perfect, the camerawork and editing are on point, and the actors seem to be having a blast.
Linklater films are dependably well populated with interesting character actors, and the MVP of the cast is definitely Austin Amelio. He plays Jasper, a scummy cop who becomes the chief antagonist, but the performance is so entertaining that I was internally cheering whenever he showed up. Retta and Sanjay Rao play Gary's snarky handlers while he's working undercover. They often feel like they stepped out of a network sitcom, but I suspect they're closer to what real cops are like than most of the ones we see onscreen.
I admit that I got overhyped for "Hit Man," one of the few bright spots in a fairly lackluster summer. And I probably got overhyped for Glen Powell too, who is doing a perfectly good job of being a leading man here, while making progress toward being a movie star. I don't think he's quite there yet, but he's definitely gaining speed.
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