‘Hit Man’ review: A sexy, funny delight

"You only get one first impression," Glen Powell says in Richard Linklater's Hit Man (2023). For many, the first impression of Powell was as the cocky pilot in Top Gun: Maverick (2022). The success of that film, followed by the more modest success and relentless marketing of 2023 sleeper hit Anyone But You, ushered him into star territory. Yet, Powell has been around in films since 2003, from the time he was 13. He was in Denzel Washington's The Great Debaters (2007), though I don't remember him in that. My first impression of him was in Linklater's Everybody Wants Some (2016), where he played a loquacious college athlete who's a touch too smart for the jockish company he keeps.

There's a passage in Everybody Wants Some where Powell's character and the new pitcher sample all the societies on campus—one night they're slamming against punk rockers, the next they're milling with theatre kids. At first, Powell's Gary Johnson in Hit Man seems a polar opposite. He's a college professor, a young divorcee, living with two cats, doing part-time tech work for the New Orleans police. One day, he's asked to fill in for a cop who goes undercover as an assassin in order to entrap clients. He's reluctant and seemingly ill-equipped, yet something mysterious happens when he gets into character. People who wait all their lives to play the lead are more prepared than they realise when the chance comes along (Powell wrote this film with Linklater).

Before Gary takes on his first assignment, there's a montage of films with hitmen, from This Gun For Fire (1942) to A Colt Is My Passport (1967). This is a stylistic outlier in the film, but nevertheless places it in conversation with the genre, allowing Linklater to use its tropes but also send it up. As Gary entraps one would-be criminal after another, his disguises get more elaborate: chatty tattooed gun nut, Patrick Bateman type with slicked-back hair, eastern European angel of death, man with scarred face, leather jacket and Clint Eastwood whisper. My favourite is the time when he goes to meet a client as—surely it can't be anything else—Tilda Swinton.

When Jane Greer enters Out of the Past (1947) and walks towards Robert Mitchum, we hear his voice on the soundtrack: "And then I saw her, coming out of the sun, and I knew why Whit didn't care about that forty grand." Hit Man isn't a noir and Please U restaurant is far less romantic than a Acapulco bar, but Madison (Adria Arjona) does come out of the sun and Gary's life isn't the same from that moment on. The film isn't the same either, changing from a dry comedy about a misfit lucking into a job he's perfect for (think of Linklater's School of Rock) into a irrepresibly sexy romance.

Madison has come to hire Ron to kill her abusive husband. But the two of them keep getting drawn into other conversations, smiling and flirting a little. As he's done with other clients, he offers her a chance to back out—and she takes it. She then calls him a few months later, and a whirlwind romance unsues. She thinks he's a hitman, her ex-husband doesn't know there's a boyfriend, and the police don't know Gary is seeing a former suspect. It wouldn't work out in a noir, but this is a romantic comedy, a genre with an entirely different outlook on fate.

In Anything But You, Powell and Sydney Sweeney were fetching and bitchy, if a little boring in their sameness. Powell and Arjona, on the other hand, have electric chemistry. They're so hot for each other they can't stop smiling. The film smiles too, soundtracking their lovemaking with the boisterous Basin Street Blues and the delicate Cast My Fate to the Wind. There's a wonderfully strange performance by Austin Amelio as the police's premier fake hitman before Gary turns up; he was a Grade A weirdo in Everybody Wants Some as well. And the clients are all terrific sketches; the film's best surprise is when the husband whose wife tried to hire Gary forgives her in court, saying 'Hell, I've done much worse and she deserves a second chance."

Gary teaches philosophy, a likely discipline for a Linklater professor. His characters, from Dazed and Confused to Waking Life to the Before films, have always been inclined to ponder larger questions of human existence. This film ends with Gary encouraging his students to "seize the identity you want for yourself" (Boyhood also ended with Mason and a friend asking whether moments could be seized). It makes me wonder if Linklater feels he settled on an identity beyond 'independent filmmaker'. His last film was an animated coming-of-age drama, his next is set in the French New Wave. In an industry obsessed like legacy and prestige, he just seems to make whatever idiosyncratic thing he wants and casually moves on to the next.

‘Hit Man’ is on Netflix.

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