1693946906 Hit Man Review Richard Linklaters Entertaining True Life Lark Starring Glen

‘Hit Man’ Review: Richard Linklater’s Entertaining ‘True-Life Lark’ Starring Glen Powell as an Idiot Who Goes Undercover as an Assassin

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Venice Film Festival

Glen Powell reigns as Gary, a part-time teacher who discovers he’s great at impersonating a hitman.

Is there something in the air? At this year’s Venice Film Festival, hitmen seem to be the unofficial theme. David Fincher’s “The Killer” is all about an icy, methodical professional executioner. Woody Allen’s “Coup de Chance” revolves around a contract killing. And now, just in time to take the excitement out of both films, we have Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, a real-life crazy underworld romantic-philosophical-thriller-comedy noir about the world’s most unlikely undercover agent. He is a unique film hero, although in many ways he is just like us.

The film, based on a 2001 Texas Monthly article (it’s one of those “inspired by a true story” things with lots of fictional embellishments), tells the story of Gary Johnson, a part-time college teacher who works for the New Orleans Police Department works as a technical advisor and helped record covert operations. He is then commissioned to investigate undercover himself. Why should this even happen? The film presents it as a coincidence – the veteran cop who did the job is suspended for bad behavior, and they need someone to step in at the last minute to pose as a hit man. Gary becomes that guy.

Glenn Powell, the actor who plays him (he’s had roles in everything from “Top Gun: Maverick” to Linklater’s “Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood” and “Everybody Wants Some!!”), delivers one Performance, that’s right, a constant sleight of hand. Powell is tall and slim with honey brown hair. He has the charisma of an unconventional leading man. He looks like Guy Pearce with Ryan Gosling, with a slightly goofy grin that radiates the purest sincerity. In “Hit Man,” he plays Gary, with rimless glasses and nerdy-hippie-professor hair, as an eager idiot, a lonely, divorced guy mostly content to be at home with his houseplants and birdhouses. his cats and his thoughts. At the University of New Orleans, Gary teaches a psychology course in which he raves about Jung and Nietzsche, but when he discusses the Nietzschean ethos of self-liberation going all out, a student grumbles, “Says the driver of the Civic.” This is Gary, a geek who dreams big.

He’s a big talker, the kind of smart-talker Linklater has loved since “Slacker.” And when he steps in as an undercover deputy agent and goes to a restaurant to meet a local criminal who wants to have someone killed, he finds he’s good at it. He becomes cool, tough and mean, acting like a seasoned sociopath – and the joke of it all is that we in the audience immediately recognize that a babbling nobody with no law enforcement experience can be a natural at it. He draws on all the popular culture he has seen; he replays the film of his thoughts. “Okay! Daniel Day!” says Claudette (Retta), one of his surveillance van colleagues, after he has completed the first job.

Still, it’s no wonder. As Gary explains in voiceover, the idea of ​​the killer, that epitome of murderous efficiency that we’ve all seen 10,000 times, may be a valued part of movies and television, but essentially it’s fiction. Killers, says Gary, don’t really exist; They are largely a mythology. And the people he wants to go undercover are regular people – they want to screw over the spouse they hate or whatever – who think it’s that easy, but it’s not the case.

Why the New Orleans police (the real Gary Johnson, who operated in Houston) wanted to spend their time catching these people, which amounts to a highly questionable form of entrapment, remains a little unclear. Nevertheless, it becomes Gary’s new job, and he does it with enthusiasm. He begins to disguise himself: scars, tattoos, beards, wigs, hats, a cigar, a Russian accent. He’s a chameleonic actor who creates entire characters, which adds a lot of fun to the film, culminating in the moment he appears as a kind of non-binary carrot-stick English psycho.

Neither Gary nor the film weeps over the desperate people he traps. But then he has a café meeting with Madison (the vivaciously sassy Adria Arjona), a forlorn beauty who wants to kill her abusive scumbag husband. The persona Gary has adopted this time is that of a slim man in black named Ron, who is so confident in his nonchalance that he’s…hot. He listens to her sob story and the two begin to flirt – but he flirts as Ron. He doesn’t just play the role of a hired killer. He pretends to be someone whose freezing coldness makes him sexy, and that makes him sexy. “Ron” and Madison fall in love.

But this puts Gary in a difficult position. Ron convinces Madison not to hire him, which raises eyebrows among Gary’s colleagues. And when Ron and Madison start dating while her husband is still in the way, the film becomes a kind of noir with bizarre twists. Gary and Ron now have different motivations that will always get in each other’s way. And the more Gary tries to hide it all backstage, the more Jasper, the officer he replaced (who is back after being suspended), realizes something is wrong. In a stunning turn, Jasper is played by Austin Amelio, who suggests that Vincent Gallo reprise the role of Wooderson from Dazed and Confused (just in time for the 30th anniversary of the film’s release, which takes place in three weeks). Jasper, with his greasy long hair, shabby mug, and brash instincts, is the veteran who’s too smart to fool, the downer in everyone’s soup.

“Hit Man” is peppered with delicious moments, but as fun as the film is, the plot progresses rather clumsily and takes too long. The original Texas Monthly article was written by Skip Hollandsworth, who also wrote the investigative piece on which Linklater’s “Bernie” (2011) – starring Jack Black as a janitor-turned-murderer – is based, and “Bernie” with its fusion of black characters Joke and True Crime, was a tighter, more resonant film. At the climax of “Hit Man” there’s a bravura sequence with Madison, Jasper and Ron, now revealed to be Gary, but still thinking, “What would Ron do?” After that, however, the film becomes all too aware that that it is a meditation on “identity.” The question is: Can we change our inner being by choosing to behave differently? Maybe so, but “Hit Man” is all about Gary coming out of his shell and learning to be a little cooler, tougher, and better dressed. I couldn’t help but feel like he would have achieved almost the same thing with a Queer Eye makeover.