Review: Hit Man

Glen Powell kills it in Richard Linklater’s fun, sexy, smart rom-com.

I have to admit that I’ve been skeptical of Glen Powell’s sudden ascent. 

True, the actor’s not exactly a rookie; he’s been kicking around in bit parts for more than 20 years, and was a high point in Richard Linklater’s raucous Everybody Wants Some!! a few years back. But a supporting role in Top Gun: Maverick seemed to have put him on Hollywood’s radar, and he was the co-lead of this year’s surprise rom-com hit Anyone But You. Now, he’s headlining a Twisters sequel and being heralded as the second coming of his pal, Mr. Cruise. While I didn’t want to denigrate Powell, the entire thing smelled of canny career planning and marketing more than anything. 

But now that I’ve seen Hit Man, I get it. Glen Powell’s the real deal, a fine actor with movie star charm. His charisma in this movie alone may have bought my ticket to Twisters. It helps that Hit Man is also a really good, highly entertaining movie, Linklater’s best since Boyhood. It’s a shame it’s been relegated to Netflix; this thing would be a blast to see with a theatrical crowd, and it might be the year’s best date night movie. 

In this sort-of true(ish) story, Powell plays Gary Johnson, a milquetoast philosophy professor. He’s divorced, lives with his two cats and is completely inconsequential. But a gig moonlighting with the local police as a data specialist takes him into new directions when he’s asked at the spur of the moment to pose as a hitman during a sting operation. Gary quickly learns he has a knack for pretending to be a hired killer and becomes the department’s go-to source. It’s all going swimmingly until Maddy (Adria Arjona), a beautiful woman looking for a way out of a fraught marriage, contacts him and he’s smitten. Although Gary, in character as a hitman named Ron, convinces her to turn away, it’s not long before Maddy waltzes back into his life and strikes up a relationship with someone she believes is a gun for hire. 

It’s a great premise, and Linklater and Powell – who co-wrote the script based on an article in Texas Monthly – both get to indulge themselves to the fullest. For Powell, it’s an opportunity to show his range, and he’s fantastic. Gary’s secret is that, as a student of human nature, he understands that since hitmen aren’t actually real, he has to tap into his targets’ fantasies of what a hired killer might look and act like. It’s an acting exercise, and the film has a great deal of fun with Gary’s various disguises, including creepy emo kids, MAGA gun fanatics, and loners straight out of the movies. The various identities sometimes flirt with caricature, but Powell handles the silliness without making it too absurd; because the film gives us fleeting glimpses of what these marks are like and how they think, it’s never too beyond the pale to imagine that Gary’s presentation meets their internal images. 

Powell is quite effective making Gary a dull-as-dirt sop, who comes home to eat microwaved dinners with his cats after class. He’s divorced and still gets along with his ex-wife, who left him because he had no passion; at one point, his narration informs the audience that he thinks too much to be good at sex, and Powell makes that believable. But he eases into the seductive, charismatic character of Ron and has a hard time shaking it when he connects with Maddy. 

It’s easy to see why – Powell and Arjona have scintillating chemistry. Linklater, no stranger to bringing witty, romantic banter to life on the screen, makes their first meeting funny, chatty and flirty; after that, the heat is slowly turned up. And when Maddy falls for Gary/Ron, it’s easy to see why he so easily roles with it. For once, he’s found something he’s passionate about, and able to project a confident, commanding personality. 

Powell and Arjona create a sexy, fun relationship between two people who mess around when they should probably be kept apart; their hot and heavy romance, mixed with the endless complications of a crime movie, would make this a perfect pairing with Soderbergh’s Out of Sight, possibly the gold-standard for grown-up-oriented, crime-adjacent rom-coms. Gary knows he should back away, but he’s having too much fun living out his own fantasies with Maddy. Arjona has a tough line to walk; she needs to portray the desperation of a woman who would want to kill her husband while also making her adorable and fun enough that we understand why Gary/Ron falls so hard. It’s a great pairing, and just watching the two talk as Gary/Ron tries to cover up his tracks is often very funny. 

Linklater is a versatile filmmaker, able to weave back and forth between low-budget, talky dramedies and experimental films and crowd-pleasing entertainment. Hit Man might be his most purely enjoyable film since School of Rock. As with that film, Linklater knows how to center a comedy around his main star’s persona and get their best work. Having worked with Powell twice prior, in Fast Food Nation and Everybody Wants Some!!!, he understands the actor’s strengths and leans into his charming, cocky persona, and shows why even Gary seems to like Ron better than he likes himself. Linklater coolly lets the plot complications unfold, especially in a back half that finds all of Gary/Ron’s lies folding in on him, resulting in a final hour that never lands where you might expect. A scene near the end involving Gary, Maddy, a police wiretap and cannily used smartphone works as both the film’s dramatic climax as well as its romantic conclusion, and the sparks between Powell and Arjona fly wonderfully. 

But Linklater’s not just making froth. What elevates this film and places it among his best is the way it marries the director’s most entertaining instincts with his career-long philosophy nerd tendencies. In voice over and conversations with his ex-wife, Gary talks about how his experiment with the police is helping him better understand personality and whether a person can choose to change their own. If Gary commits to being Ron long and hard enough, could Rob become more real than Gary? And what of the consequences Ron’s philosophies and behaviors have on those around them? 

Hit Man’s greatest joy is that it’s just as thoughtful and smart as any of Linklater’s headier works, including the Before trilogy or Waking Life. But the introspection and navel-gazing are woven into a script that’s fleet-footed, surprising and highly entertaining. You can picture the smile on Linklater’s and Powell’s faces as they wrote Gary into endless corners and let him wriggle his way out. There’s a shaggy quality to the script, a looseness that in the wrong hands could feel messy but that fits perfectly with Linklater’s amiable vibe. Few directors are better at capturing people shooting the shit, and the movie benefits from a great supporting cast, particularly Parks and Recreation’s Retta as one of the cops and Austin Amelio as the scuzzy, suspicious undercover detective Gary’s replaced. 

I do have some issues with Hit Man’s final moments, in which the film writes itself a few too many endings. Linklater and Powell’s script seems to close out on a fascinating, morally gray ending that leaves the audience unsettled; whether I agreed with the choices in that moment or not, it felt like the choice those characters would make and could have provided great fodder for discussion following the film. But the film comes back for an epilogue that waves away any moral ickiness and feels falser for it (I may have to go back and rewatch it and write about it in more depth later).  

But it’s a minute out of a two-hour film that, for 99% of its run time is funny, smart and sexy as hell. Hit Man is Linklater at the top of his game and positions Powell as one of our next great stars. Don’t miss it. 

Hit Man is currently in theaters and streams on Netflix June 7.