Hits Most of It's Targets

(071824) Hit Man is a smart and hard-hitting crime drama that also includes elements of screwball comedy as well as romance. It is about a mild-mannered philosophy and psychology professor who lives a double life when he begins posing as an assassin.
It does not have a great deal of star power, but at the time of this writing it was the most streamed film on Netflix. The cast includes Glenn (Top Gun: Maverick) Powell, Adria Arjona, Austin Amelio and Retta. Not one of them would be capable of opening a film big, but this is better and more well-crafted than most of the year’s big blockbusters.

In some ways it parallels last year’s under rated and excellent thriller The Killer. Both of them were big critical hits at film festivals and were bought by a big studio for streaming. Both are Indy films with modest budgets by respected but underrated directors and both have rare insights into human nature. But although they are similar on the surface, Hit Man also contrasts in important ways with The Killer. While that film is about the world of an assassin and the mindset of a real killer this one explores the mindscape of a man impersonating an assassin and the film suggests that real assassins that work for private people are rare or do not even exist. The Killer adds to and reinforces mythology of the gangster while this film demythologizes the gangster story.

The film was directed by Richard Linklater who along with Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson was one of the best and most eclectic directors to emerge in the1990s. Some of his most notable films include Slacker (1990), Dazed and Confused (1993), Waking Life (2001), School of Rock (2003), Boyhood (2014), and  Apollo 10 ½ (2022). But he did his greatest work on a romantic trilogy using the same characters shot over 29 years: Before Sunrise (1998), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013). He started out at around the same time as Kevin Smith who is also known and both became associated with the slacker or 1990s alternative era, but unlike Linklater, Smith lost his way in the last 20 years and his films have become increasingly unwatchable while Linklater has rarely stumbled (even his animated films like A Scanner Darkly are superior.)

The film was written by Linklater and the lead actor in this film plays Gary Johnson. The pair had also worked together on Everybody Wants Some. The real Johnson who inspired this character was a fascinating person. He died in 2022 and he set up over 70 undercover arrests. The fictional one in this film shares many traits with the real one. They are both bird lovers, Buddhists, Viet Nam veterans and lovers of technology.

In this film (and in real life) Gary does tech support for the police helping them with surveillance. But an opportunity arises when the police force’s regular fake assassin Jasper (Austin Amelio) who is a scumbag Is suspended for roughing up an innocent teen. Gary ends up filling in for him posing as a hit man in order to entrap people who want to have someone killed so that the police can charge them.

Gary is much better at the job than his predecessor because he goes about it more smartly. He goes to extraordinary lengths to fool people. Like the main characters in the Baretta TV series and the Serpico film, he uses costumes, as well as fake teeth, stains, scars tattoos, and accents to get in character. He also thoroughly researches his potential victims and becomes whatever he thinks they are looking for in an assassin and takes on a different personality for each case.

An unexpected side effect is that since he has to frequently act as cool as Marlon Brando or Miles Davis, he starts to act cool in his everyday life. To everyone’s surprise he excels in his work, which he clearly loves and when his conviction rate far surpasses his predecessors Jaspar’s record. The police give him the position permanently, and the guy he replaced Jasper is understandably not too pleased about this, and he becomes his enemy.

Gary is frequently in a grey moral area and he and the audience might momentarily wonder whether what he is doing is ethical. Sometimes he feels regret over his actions. There is a great court room scene in which a public defendant representing one of the people that tried to hire him for a hit accuses him or coercion or entrapment and he says Gary is “the lowest kind of person who practices entrapment and would use a bazooka to kill a mosquito.”

Sometimes when he feels sorry for the felons, he tries to get some of them not to order to a hit. Technically the people might have changed their mind if he did not push them. His emotional connections to his work cause him to cross certain boundaries that complicate things. But things get tricky and problematic when he gets too involved and starts to become the characters he is playing.

He feels an immediate attraction to Madison (Adria Arjona who played Marleen in Morbius). Madison’s husband is abusive or so she says and would not let her work and is one of the least likeable characters in recent cinema. Gary goes against his mission and advises her against ordering a hit because he feels sorry for her, but I am sure it does not hurt that she is portrayed as sympathetic, and she is also a knockout.

They start dating and after a while you get the feeling, she might be subtly manipulating him. She supposedly falls for him thinking he is a dangerous assassin, and she is attracted to the danger. He acts more spontaneously and assertively in the role, and he fears she will not be attracted to him if she finds out the truth. As Gary knows more about her and her unhappy marriage, he is tempted to kill her husband himself.
 But are things really as they seem or is she just faking her love to set up a crime and make him a patsy?
The whole scenario echoes the one in the classic film noir, Double Indemnity and there are also story elements taken from The Postman Always Rings Twice as well as Body Heat, but the film finds ways to surprise and does not totally follow the genre formulas of previous films.

Hit Man also has some parallels with the recent lesbian neo-noir Love Lies Bleeding with a more mild-mannered protagonists tempted by romantic partners that get them in trouble, but that was film was grittier, grim and dirtier. This film is far gentler and humorous in comparison which may make its unexpected violence that comes out seemingly from nowhere even more shocking. Some viewers and critics might think it disrupts the tone of the overall film, but not me. I think this makes the violence all the more shocking and effective.

At its core the Hit Man is about the malleability of identity. The film’s theme is set up by some conversations that take place early in the film. Gary tells his class and ex-wife, Alicia (Molly Bernard) who overhears part of his lecture that a person’s personality can be permanently altered by circumstance. His theory is put to the test when the mind mannered passionless and emotionally remote college prof (it is implied this is what caused problems in his marriage) begins acting more impulsively and begins to take more chances when he is called upon to pretend, he is an assassin. Ironically, his ex-wife implies that she left him because he did not have display these character traits, he acquired in his assassin persona when she was married to him.

This is more than a job to him, and it gives him the opportunity to become someone else and bring out a more primal side to his personality. The film shows that identity which is actually constructed through overlapping viewpoints of different people is not immutable. From his experience learns (and later shares this with his students and the audience) to seize or create the identity they want for themselves.

The film is quite intelligent and philosophical (the director himself was a former philosophy student) without ever being heavy handed. It also manages to be suspenseful, funny and dramatic all at the same time. In almost every way the film hits its targets.