Doing a deep dive into Richard Linklater’s 22 entries and counting filmography reveals a diversity of topics and a spectrum of tones that the Texas-born director and screenwriter has tackled to considerable success. The breadth of his résumé defies most assumptions about his interests and stylistic quirks that might be surmised from any one of his movies. So he may not be easy to pigeonhole, but his latest feature release Hit Man continues an impressive string of well-crafted and immensely watchable movies.
Linklater’s career was launched with festival attention and a distributor for his mini-budget 1990 movie Slacker, for which he provided script, direction, and even an onscreen performance. That led to the first of his films to really strike a chord with audiences: 1993’s Dazed and Confused, a coming-of-age comedy following a group of Austin teenagers on the last day of high school in 1976. He would go on to craft the tender Before trilogy, tracing the turbulent romance between a man (Ethan Hawke) and woman (Julie Delpy) over a number of years; direct the hit music-skewed comedy School of Rock, featuring Jack Black in peerless antic mode; experiment with animation (Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly); and helm a remake of the raucous little league baseball movie The Bad News Bears.
It’s fair to single out the 2014 achievement Boyhood as a Linklater high point. Nominated for six Academy Awards, Boyhood was shot over the course of more than a decade with the same actors portraying father (Ethan Hawke), mother (Patricia Arquette), son (Ellar Coltrane), and daughter (Lorelei Linklater) throughout to watch the family — in particular the son — grow and change as time goes on. The accolades for the ambitious and affecting Boyhood were plentiful, and though it didn’t have much of a commercial impact, Linklater’s immediate follow-up, Everybody Wants Some!!, was an absolute blast. An informal sequel to Dazed and Confused, it observed the foibles and mating rituals of the players on a college baseball team during the first weekend of the fall semester. Somehow, it fell through the cracks. And “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” — his prickly 2019 dramedy starring Cate Blanchett — wasn’t much of a crowd-pleaser.
Leaving ‘Boyhood’ behind
Another animated movie from Linklater, 2022’s easygoing semiautobiographical Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood, may have lowered expectations, regarding his next project. Even so, Hit Man — debuting on Netflix this weekend after a short theatrical run — is one of the best things he’s ever done, drawing on the range of styles he’s mastered to produce an assured and captivating intersection of genres. With the real escapades of an actual police contractor named Gary Johnson as inspiration, Hit Man is an unexpected mix of neo-noir crime thriller, romantic comedy, and morality play, with a stealth treatise on the nature of identity as its subtext. It also provides the worthiest and most multifaceted role to date for rising star Glen Powell, the square-jawed hunk who had a significant supporting part in Top Gun: Maverick and upped the ante as leading man opposite Sydney Sweeney in the recent rom-com success Anyone But You. As the hit man of the title, he’s alternately genial, off-the-cuff, stalwart, self-effacing, suave, intimidated, conniving, amorous, and noble. And you buy the whole package.
Linklater’s mélange of action, mystery, sex, and laughs fits right into his canon.
Linklater has admitted to taking liberties with aspects of Johnson’s life to give Hit Man a wee more fire power, but certain elements, such as his subject’s primary vocations, are depicted. Thus, the fictionalized version of Johnson that’s portrayed by Powell is a professor at the University of New Orleans whose skill at creating and inhabiting different personas allows him to moonlight as a fake hit man for the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD). His part-time job with the cops is to ensnare people looking to hire a contract killer, and he’s good at it. For all of the risks involved, it’s just a gig until he falls for one of his marks — the extremely pretty and sexy Madison, played by Adria Arjona — and dissuades her from going through with a hit on her estranged husband. When Madison responds to the faux hit man he’s portraying, he can’t resist her, and they start an affair, which becomes increasingly dangerous for both of them.
Complications and chemistry
Even though the complications get dark, Hit Man has more than its share of comedic moments — some of them courtesy of Powell’s parade of idiosyncratic hit-man guises and others from the hapless or clueless “clients” that Johnson encounters. By any metric, Powell is impressive as Johnson, funny and charming like some latter-day American version of Cary Grant, and he has great chemistry with Arjona. The two of them seriously bring the heat. Meanwhile, the supporting players are well cast and across-the-board colorful, especially Austin Amelio, Retta and Sanjay Rao as Johnson’s NOPD handlers and the cast members portraying the string of would-be criminals who are targets for the police sting operation. Of course, the New Orleans locations are super-cool.
It should be noted that Powell was not only an actor here; he was one of Linklater’s two screenwriting collaborators on the movie’s sharp script. The extent of his screenplay contributions aside, the depth of the performance alone is proof that he’s more than another handsome Hollywood cipher. Although Hit Man is not quite like any of his previous movies, Linklater’s mélange of action, mystery, sex, and laughs fits right into his canon. All of the disparate elements come together, whether gritty, sultry, or outlandish, and it’s fun! Hit Man deserves to be a hit, man.
Hit Man is currently in theaters and will be available for streaming on Netflix this Friday.
