Hit Man Review: The Art of Pretending

With Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, the charismatic Glen Powell has been offered a plum opportunity to shape his image into something more complicated and often poignant. Powell stars as Gary Johnson, a philosophy professor at the University of New Orleans who moonlights as a pretend hitman in sting operations. That premise may seem far-fetched, but the script gives a logical pathway for Johnson’s nerdy tech hobby to seem appealing to the Nola police department’s surveillance teams. And, also, this story mostly really happened.

What remains unbelievable, especially to Gary’s surveillance teammates, is just how good he is at playing a seasoned contract killer. Gary develops disguises tailored to his mark’s idea of a hitman, inhabits that role until the incriminating cash is exchanged, then settles down at home with his cats Id and Ego—turns out, he teaches psychology classes as well—and a microwaveable meal. Then, the lonely professional falls for the femme fatale, Madison (Adria Arjona), who’s trying to hire him to kill her abusive husband, and suddenly his life is turned upside down.

Powell makes great hay of this predicament: of Gary getting to work on his character of “Ron”—an animalistic bad boy, free of the academic’s curse of neurosis—and how his triple life poses tangible danger to him and Madison. And the only way out for Gary is to practice what he preaches to students all day long: that one’s identity is malleable and one’s responsibility is to change it for the better. That may sound like an easy resolution, but Powell makes it feel tricky.

Throughout Hit Man, Linklater is committed to making New Orleans a character in its own right, showing off classic hangouts like the Garden District’s Please-U-Restaurant, the University of New Orleans campus bordering Lake Pontchartrain, and Bywater’s beloved Vaughan’s Lounge. The inescapable I-10 and the French Quarter are occasionally glimpsed in most car scenes, which is to say, the film isn’t interested in conjuring a familiar vision of the Big Easy. There are no yardstick-wielding tourist mobs and Mardi Gras debauchery on display. Instead, Linklater lets the city’s colorful shotgun houses and the faint brass-band soundtrack paint a picture of that relaxed New Orleans that locals are intimately familiar with.

And like other relaxed, lived-in sunshine noirs like The Big Lebowski and The Big Bounce, Hit Man toys with our expectations of a movie about a contract killer by lowering the stakes. Each scene with another mark is played as a bit, from Gary donning yet another disguise, to giving an on-the-spot spiel about the gruesome details of his purported job, to busting yet another perp, to mugshots appearing on screen as punchlines. Even the most tense scene in the film is deflated thanks to a bit of ingenious physical comedy, in this case the use of a phone’s Notes app.

As early as Dazed & Confused, Linklater has been most preoccupied with the self and identity and their coherence and mutability. The freshmen of that 1993 breakthrough ritualistically endure the shame of hazing in the understanding that one day, as seniors, they’ll be transformed into the holders of the paddles themselves. The Before Trilogy depicts how time subtly shapes the relationship between two lovers. And Everybody Wants Some!!, Linklater’s masterful look at social identity, shows the osmotic cultural utopia that’s college life: Put on the punk outfit, dance to the punk music, and, tonight, by the punks’ blessings, you’re a punk.

Hit Man’s Gary literally spells out the Linklaterian thesis in a lecture seemingly cribbed from the ideas of sociologist Erving Goffman—namely, that identity, mostly fixed to our performative social roles, can be changed through will and practice. Such a message wouldn’t be out of place in a coming-of-age movie where a character’s self may be the subject of experiment based on the formative events of adolescence, but here, the thirtysomething Gary simply chooses to become “Ron” based on his idea of the good life for himself and Madison.

Many of Linklater’s films are united by their celebration of the pretentious in its etymological meaning of “playing pretend.” With Hit Man, he and Powell take this further by demonstrating that acting isn’t just entertainment or art—it’s also a fundamental part of our lives.