Hit Man on Netflix

Or: Become a better person. Kill the old one.

Murder gets a bad rap. Yes, yes most of the time it’s terrible, and senseless, and just plain pathetic. But who amongst us has not indulged in a tiny, harmless homicidal day dream? (Plenty of people, I’m sure. Especially you, Dear Reader, you specifically are totally free of thoughts of whacking anybody off.) But because the law exists for a reason, and life is so full of vagaries, why not contact a professional to make those day dreams a reality?

The problem is, of course, that you’re more likely to call up someone like Gary Johnson (Glen Powell) a college professor, birder who moonlights as a audio tech for the New Orleans police department. Gary’s life (depicted by director Richard Linklater) is potted into a series of small, boxes (a cinderblock classroom, a suburban home he shares with his two cats) content but hardly flourishing. Moreover, like his real life counterpart the film is based on, he has committed absolutely no murders. Until the day he’s pushed into the role of a police mole, creating on the fly the character of a hitman to entrap a na’er-do-well with lethal designs.

So begins his new passion of pretending to be a wide variety of contract killer (tailored to his clients expectations) and handing them over to the authorities when they give him the go-ahead and the money. Until the day he meets Madison Masters (Adria Arjona) a good woman in a bad marriage to the vicious and controlling Ray (Evan Holtzman). What happens next… you can probably guess.

Or not, as the case may be. Hit Man is a move that is smart, sexy and romantic (two adjectives that don’t often go together) and above all endlessly surprising. It’s not often I can feel a smile stretching across my face, nor do I hop on the couch in unadulterated glee, swept along right at the threshold of revelation for such a sustained amount of time. The dialog (written by Linklater and Powell) alone is phenomenal. Midway through the film, Gary sits down with his ex Alicia (Molly Bernard). Their amiable conversation arranges the moral of the film, that what you act like you will eventually become, for better or worse. It’s plainly stated but not neatly packaged for consumption, an object that can be turned in multiple directions, and naturally nestled in a conversation between two very smart people who have great affection for each other but who’s conversation is still filled with the barbs of a relationship that could not help but hurt both parties.

That’s the energy that Bernard and Powell have together. What he shares with Arjona is absolutely staggering. As characters and actors, both keep each other on their toes, and bring each other to be the most human, not only in the many, many scenes of carnal embrace, but in littler moments of peeved triumph, or philosophical argument, or caught out of bed and frizzy by their partner having discovered something terrible about their past.

Arjona and Powell are perfectly cast, but so is the whole movie, especially Jasper (Austin Amelio) the former police mole who wants his job back from Gary and resident bad cop/extremely bad cop/incopetent as well as horrible cop/probably an immortal confederate private, one of the really seedy and unpleasant ones, living Outlander style in the present day.

A picture of people at their best and their worst, Hit Man is hilarious without trying to be funny. brilliant without trying to be flashy, and a feel good movie about being ever oh so bad.