An Action Rom-Com? Yes, Hit Man is a Surefire Delight

Hit Man, the new film from director Richard Linklater, isn’t really about a hit man. It’s about the myth of the hit man, or at least “the hitman-for-hire.” Yes, occasionally, mafias and shady corporations and dictatorships do seem to have assassins to sic on their enemies. But the idea that any random person can track down and hire a local hit man to do their dirty work? Fiction. Hit Man is about that fiction, that myth, that understanding. Glen Powell plays Gary Johnson, an uncool philosophy professor at a New Orleans university who moonlights, for extra cash, helping the local police department with tech for their sting operations. If it weren’t for this side gig, he’d be back home petting his cats, grading papers, and bird-watching. (He doesn’t really have a lot going on.) But one day, Gary finds himself out of the surveillance van and inside a sting; he’s a plant, pretending to be a hit man for a man who has tried to hire one. His job is simply to seem legit enough that the suspect ends up incriminating himself. But, it turns out, he’s really, really good at pretending to be a killer. “Pretending” is the operative word here. It’s not the “killer” part that Gary latches onto, it’s the performative aspect. Soon, he develops different hitmen characters, each tailored to the specific personalities of the suspects looking for a killer. “Who’s your hitman?” he asks himself, of suspects he researches in advance. He busts out costumes, wigs, makeup, and all manner of accessories, and experiments with accents and attitudes. At its essence, Hit Man is about a man who is given a stage and an audience and falls in love with the act of performance. Not that anyone should care, but I wrote a doctoral dissertation on the theatricality and performativity of “detection and surveillance” (in 19th century literature entertainment, but still), so I was personally delighted by the questions and ideas that Hit Man plays around with. The plot takes off when Gary finds himself both unable to fully commit to his character’s mission […]

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