NYFF 2023: 'Hit Man' is a crowd-pleasing triumph from Richard Linklater

Glen Powell finally gets his true movie star turn in Linklater’s crime comedy, which also stars a smoldering Adria Arjona and a wonderfully scuzzy Austin Amelio.

Image: Netflix

(Note: At the New York Film Festival this week, I saw two major films: Maestro and Hit Man. I’m still processing my thoughts on Maestro and will get to it soon; in the meantime, here’s my review of Hit Man.) 

Richard Linklater, like few major contemporary filmmakers, makes several very different kinds of enjoyable movies. There are his hangout movies (Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Suburbia, and Everybody Wants Some!!), his epic meditations on time (the Before trilogy, Boyhood, and his far-in-the-future Merrily We Roll Along movie), his animated larks (Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly, Apollo 10 1⁄2: A Space Age Childhood) and even his more traditional crowd-pleasers (School of Rock.) 

His latest film, Hit Man, is part of another, lesser-known Linklater subgenre: Oddball true crime dark comedy set in the South and adapted from a Texas Monthly article by journalist Skip Hollandsworth. That was the pedigree of Linklater’s 2011 film Bernie, which starred Jack Black as a gay mortician accused of murdering his patron (Shirley MacLaine), and in spite of that (or maybe because of it) being treated as a hero in his small Texas town. 

Hit Man also comes from Hollandsworth’s work, and it’s a story so wild that I’m surprised it wasn’t made into a movie before. I’m also very glad it was made exactly the way it was- by just the right director, the right leading man, and the exact right tone. 

The film, very loosely based on a true story, stars Glen Powell as Gary Johnson, a mild-mannered college professor who does some freelance work for the New Orleans Police Department- mostly IT stuff, but occasionally something more resembling actual police work. 

But once his sleazy colleague Jasper (Austin Amelio) gets suspended, Gary is pressed into service with a new assignment: He’s to present himself as a hit man, get people seeking to arrange murders-for-hire to confess on tape, and then arrest them. 

Gary proves adept at this, complete with elaborate costumes, accents, and personas, and he also sees himself gaining more confidence and assertiveness than we’re used to seeing from the college professor version of him. 

Soon, he meets a prospective client, a breathtakingly beautiful woman named Maddy (Adria Arjona) who wants him to kill her abusive husband, though he talks her into leaving him instead, and they soon fall into a passionate, sexy affair. 

That sounds exactly like every film noir plot of the 1940s. But it’s not really presented that way- it’s more a puzzle the film seeks to solve, of how these two can continue to date, while under the noses of Gary’s colleagues in the police department while avoiding the bad husband and bad cop. 

It all comes to a head in what may be the year’s best movie scene, in which the two have a conversation that they know is on tape and must talk their way out of the problem. 

The film is both tightly plotted and screamingly funny, thanks to a witty screenplay that Linklater and Powell co-wrote. It also uses New Orleans very well, despite the well-established Texas inclinations of the director, and the real story having happened in Houston. 

But what really makes Hit Man go is Glen Powell. 

The actor broke out in Linklater’s 2015 film Everybody Wants Some!!, and while he was in a popular Netflix romance called Set It Up (with his Everybody Wants Some!! love interest Zoey Deutch), and has impressed in other films like Top Gun: Maverick and Devotion, I’ve been waiting for him to break through as a real movie star ever since. This movie, finally, is that breakthrough. 

Powell, in every role I’ve ever seen him in before now, has played the coolest dude in the room (except for in Top Gun: Maverick, where he was the second-coolest.) In Hit Man, he’s totally convincing as a dork who slowly turns into something more closely resembling the actor’s usual screen persona. 

Arjona breaks through as well as a character who’s somewhere between a femme fatale and a standard love interest. Amelio, meanwhile, is wonderfully scuzzy as the personification of every negative trait of American police officers to come to the fore in the last ten years. You could practically visualize him posting violent racist memes on Facebook. The other cops in the movie, including Parks & Recreation veteran Retta, are much more honorable, albeit very gullible. And yes, the film puts the audience in a position to root for egregious police misconduct.

Sure, some things don’t quite add up. Since when do police departments use moonlighting college professors as undercover officers? If the same guy was repeatedly presenting himself as a killer for hire, wouldn’t word eventually get out in the New Orleans underworld- and wouldn’t that eventually lead to one of these murderous people whacking him? 

Despite all that, Hit Man is one of my favorite films of the year so far, and Linklater’s second straight home run, after last year’s Apollo 10 1⁄2: A Space Age Childhood. 

Hit Man was acquired by Netflix out of Venice and played at NYFF, although the company has not announced a release date, or whether the film will get a theatrical bow. If it does, please see it with a crowd- I guarantee they’ll applaud at the end of a certain scene. 

There’s no official trailer yet for Hit Man, but someone on YouTube — apparently not ever having seen a Linklater film and thinking he is an acolyte of Michael Bay — made an unintentionally hilarious fake one:

No, the real movie is not set in New York City, does not have any character driving Batman’s motorcycle from The Dark Knight, and does not feature a hot air balloon.