"Hit Man" Is Not To Be Skipped

I really didn’t want to buy into Hollywood making a new male movie star–that old wheeze they’ve sold us on forever.  

 Not to sound too Yoda, but I’ve watched it all happen before. In rough sequence, I remember watching:

Tom Cruise nearly knocking himself out tackling another (supposed) high school football player on a dusty field on 1983’s “All the Right Moves”;  a young-ish Kevin Costner marching across a hotel lobby to draw his service weapon and shout at DeNiro’s Al Capone on 1987 's “The Untouchables” (with "Bull Durham" hot on its heels the next year);  Brad Pitt popping up shirtless in “Thelma  and Louise” in 1991.  

I recall doing one of the many articles on the inception of a big career for Matthew McConaughey  when the Texan (who’d been memorably cast by  “Hit Man” director Richard Linklater in 1993’s  in “Dazed and Confused”) grabbed the horns of his abrupt stardom in “A Time To Kill” three years later.          

Unmistakably on that roster of  breakout stars is Ryan Gosling, who’s remained Ken-ough to coast on"Barbie" despite all the industry handwringing over  the tepid later box office for “The Fall Guy”. It was three years after years after he bloomed onscreen in the romance “The Notebook” that I met him, at a drinks thing after a screening of “Lars and the Real Girl,” and realizing, yes, this guy’s able to go wide and deep. Which in turn puts one in mind of Bradley Cooper, who leveraged sexy brooding into a director/producer’s career.

 It’s that latter thought—the idea of seeing somebody with the whole kit-bag of stardom ready to deploy that occurred upon watching Glen Powell’s  chortle-provoking, gently twisted tour de force turn in “Hit Man,” now in theaters and streaming on Netflix starting June 7. 

It hardly shook the earth upon landing. The Writers Guild Theater, where I saw it, had been only two-thirds full for a 5 p.m. “Hit Man” screening this past Sunday. (Even as a mere sprinkle of theatrical screenings gave Netflix the chance to cite it as being “in theaters”.)

 The film, made for just under $9 million and acquired by the streamer at the Venice Film Festival for $20 million, was always planned, despite its seemingly audience-friendly nature, as a typical Netflix couch-friendly play. This despite a sense in the media—notably via a Variety screed—that it might have been better served, and also might have helped energize the currently anemic national box office scene, if given a decent theatrical run. No such luck.

And yet the arriving-star impact is hard to deny.

After the WGA screening (to a younger crowd than usual), doing some kvelling  in the elevator were two cheery young women. More as a tribute to the leading man’s coyote-handsome, ripped-abs  appeal than as an actual.critique of the logic of the screenplay he wrote with director Linklater, she opined, "Girlfriend, I’m just not buying Glen Powell as a nerd.”

 Fair enough. But check out the girl our boy's trying to get. (Or is she trying to get him?)  The audience’s straight males, for their part, were surely goggle-eyed in witnessing  a different kind of arrival on a bigger stage—that of the rising talent Adria Arjona as Madison, the “love interest” to Powell’s character(s). 

Why the quotes around “love interest”. Well, it would be complicated and a bit spoiler-y  to blither on, but the trailer tells us Ray is a “fake hit man”–to cite the phrase he rather deliciously sputters during a far-too-late late confession.

But in the great rom-com tradition of misdirected characters, love must at least try to conquer all. Powell must also inhabit the assassin-for-hire Ron, not just in his side hustle as an undercover cop entrapping a mug’s gallery of murder-for-hire clients, but also to keep the beat as he's falling for Arjona’s  take-no-prisoners, unhappy rich boy’s wife Madison.

 Powell’s succession of cosplay hit men—the rationale fueling Gary's deceptions is the theory that movies have miseducated the public imagination as to just how a hit man rolls—are archly  gimmicky, tossed onscreen as revelations from a magician’s trunk of amusing impersonations (wait for the Tilda Swinton take).

 Plot-wise, it’s a lot (as I wish people would quit saying about everything, all day long).

 The couple’s frankly libidinous relationship is mingled,  via nesting-doll story twists, with the saga’s “somewhat true” real life adventures.

It’s in the very deceptions that the juice of the romance is  entertainingly squeezed.

 When these ironies baked into the deft screenplay are quite cleverly enforced by performances large and small from the ensemble, the stakes build to a certain scene in the third act that had the WGA  cinema crowd—and reportedly audiences that saw it first at Sundance and elsewhere—breaking into hearty applause as it ended. 

The thespian pickleball of said scene brings to fruition one of the plot’s clockwork, ticklishly entertaining ironies–that the fake hit man, if he had any sense, would never dare to be seduced by this raven-haired Latina beauty. Arjona flashes ample charisma to drive Gary– he of the slightly wounded, passion-deficient ego– deep into the realm of the id persona he’s been visiitng as Ron. 

In the midst of this third-act, screwball-adjacent  implosion of grand schemes, (the two actors gleefully up the ante– after all, Powell has explained, their love language is “role play” —and show us “performance on top of performance on top of performance.”

Let’s just say they earn the spontaneous applause heard in various rooms, including in the Guild's theater.

 There’s plenty of slow-fuse laughs to enjoy in the picture, much thanks to Linklater’s casting choices throughout. Most notable may be actress Retta (of “Parks & Rec”) as the wised-up team veteran and the snickeringly evil popinjay of a rival undercover cop played by Austin Amelio  (“The Walking Dead”) as  Gary/Ron’s would-be nemesis.

 The constantly-mutating tension of Gary’s deceptions finally gives way to something slap-happily satisfying and rather ballsy. From  the time Powell turned up strikingly as the  motor-mouthing Finn in Linklater’s addled romp “Everybody Wants Some," and as a smart-ass finding his soul in 2018's "Set It Up,"  we’ve known he has comic chops. But his assiduous career maneuvers into actual film-making craft—e.g., convincing Tom Cruise to beef up Powell's Hangman role in “Top Gun: Maverick”—he’s heading into an open terrain of yes, becoming that new male movie star we, one is forced to admit, we always seem to need. 

 Wendy Ide, film Critic for England’s The Observer, voiced it in a way Hollywood may actually come to agree with: “'Hit Man’ takes Powell’s amiable, supporting actor appeal and hones it to a star quality of such laser-beam intensity, you start to fear for your eyesight.” 

Of such avid metaphors is stardom made. And reluctant or no, I just might have to buy in after all.