Hit Man - Review Thread

Hit Man(6/7/2024)
Hit Man is the latest film from Richard Linklater, which has gotten a lot of discourse because it was purchased for distribution by Netflix who have not really been rolling out the red carpet to make it feel like a big deal despite it have a very well received festival run and feeling like a very audience pleasing piece of work. Indeed, it feels like a movie that a lot of people would like if they gave it a chance but I can also see why it would be a pretty tough movie to promote in this movie environment in part because its main appeal is the chemistry it displays between its two stars, neither of whom are household names and if star chemistry wasn’t enough to sell people on The Fall Guy I’m not sure how much a chance this movie stood.

Within Linklater’s body of work this feels like something of a companion piece to his 2011 film Bernie in that both are based on real life human interest stories that have murder in their peripheries. This one looks at a guy (Glenn Powell) who works with the police in a civilian capacity and finds himself doing undercover work setting up sting operations where he poses as a hired killer to catch people in the act of soliciting murder contracts. The plot really kicks in when he’s doing one of these stings on a woman (Adria Arjona) who seems to be wanting to kill her abusive husband but leaves the meeting without incriminating herself and he finds something striking about her. A while later he finds himself meeting her again and she’s no longer with her husband and he strikes up a relationship with her, but he’s still posing as that hit man and has adopted a much different personality than his usual persona as a result. So in a lot of ways the film sort of feels like a big set up for the ultimate in romcom third act “you lied to me!” twist misunderstanding/relationship obstacles, and on some level it does do that but the situation is so extreme that this feels less like something going through the formula motions. In fact the film is in many ways the inversion of the universal relationship advice of “just be yourself” which is upheld by all those other movies; literally and figuratively “being someone else” is the entire basis for the film’s relationship and while it does complicate things for all involved it is ultimately what makes these two people gel and the movie does not entirely walk this back by its ending.

At the film’s opening it announces that it’s based on a true story and the movie sort of leans into this with its voiceover but the claim is a bit misleading. The main character is based on a real guy who really did undercover stings like this (though not as many as are depicted and his entrance into this work was different) and his observations about this trade appear to be drawn from actual interviews with him. However, the film’s entirely storyline about his relationship with the Adria Arjona character and his friction with a corrupt cop played by Austin Amelio appears to be entirely made up. I kind of wish the movie had trumpeted its “based on a true story” bonafides a bit less because certain elements of the police procedure here plus several elements of the romance kind of ring false in ways that would have stood out less had this just been sold as a work of fiction. In particular the story starts to take turns in its third act that would seem to be basically impossible to tell unless things turned out pretty badly for these characters and would have rung a bit differently had the movie just been sold as a story. Set that aside though and there’s a whole lot to like here. As previously mentioned Glenn Powell and Adria Arjona have a lot of chemistry here which makes what could easily feel like a rather twisted and manipulative relationship feel both believable and like something you want root for and that’s kind of an accomplishment amidst all this craziness.
**** out of Five