I always look forward to the films of Richard Linklater, whom I consider one of the most interesting American filmmakers. His films manage to bring to the screens novel landscapes of American reality and characters that involve their viewers. His persistence in long-term projects has managed to transform time perspectives that span many years and decades into plots and images. Linklater is constantly looking for new characters to turn into stories on screen and new forms of expression to tell their stories. However, not all of his experiments are successful to my taste. This is also the case with ‘Hit Man‘, an original combination which, however, failed to convince me.
‘Hit Man‘ is inspired by a real-life character named Gary Johnson, who lived in Houston and assisted the local police as an undercover agent, posing as a professional killer to those looking to buy assassination services and gathering evidence (mostly taped recordings of conversations) to arrest and prosecute them for planning murders. The script moves the action to New Orleans and assigns Gary the job of art teacher, showing him giving moral and life lessons to his young students. As long as he builds the character of the teacher who masquerades as different variants of professional killers, adapting his physiognomy and attitude to the ‘clients’, the film is interesting and funny. When the romantic component is added, it becomes less believable, not to mention the moral and legal ambiguities. What doesn’t work? To a large extent, the role and activities of the police assistant hero are based on the first impression, or if you want, on the prejudices through which people judge those around them. The police disguises may fool the buyers of crime services, but the identity game on which the romantic story is based is more difficult to believe. A relationship based on false identities has no chance of standing the test of time. Or maybe the script wants to tell us that true love can overcome even lies about identity? Such a message is too trivial to support the surprises in the second part of the film. Linklater uses tools from the film noir toolkit mixed with romantic comedies and a little eroticism, but the combination just didn’t work for me.
Glen Powell is a good actor, but what he does in this movie constantly reminded me of Ryan Gosling and in cases like this I prefer the original. His romantic partner is played by Adria Arjona, who looks fantastic but whom I need to see in other roles to convince myself of her acting qualities. ‘Hit Man‘ is a movie that many will like, OK as entertainment, but I found it to be one of Richard Linklater‘s weaker movies. In my opinion, this is one of the highly overrated movies of this season.