These days, it's not news when the new movie from an Oscar-winning director pops up on streaming after a minimal theatrical release. You can see Hit Man, the latest from Richard Linklater (Boyhood, Dazed and Confused), only on Netflix. Inspired by an oddball true story and starring and cowritten by ascendant leading man Glen Powell (of winter's surprise hit Anyone but You), this quasi-rom-com has been generating plenty of social media discussion.
If you're expecting a crime caper about a hit man with a heart of gold, think again. Gary Johnson (Powell), the film's protagonist and narrator, wants us to know that "Hit men don't exist," except in Hollywood movies.
So no, Gary isn't a hit man — he's a cat-loving, bird-watching college psychology and philosophy professor who moonlights for the New Orleans Police Department pretending to be a hit man. When someone seeks help in getting rid of a "problem," the cops send in a wire-wearing Gary to conduct a sting operation and put the would-be murderer in jail.
Though Gary more or less lucked into the job, he's turned it into an art form, using disguises and accents to give each perp the hit man they expect. But none of that prepares him for his assignment to Madison (Adria Arjona), a frightened young woman looking to off her abusive husband.
Moved by her plight, Gary puts on his therapist hat and persuades Madison to rethink her plan without breaking his cover. The thing is, Madison thinks "Ron" the hit man is kind of hot. And their mutual attraction could get extremely awkward for Ron's alter ego.
For roughly its first two-thirds, Hit Man is an unexpected delight. Powell has charisma to burn, whether he's playing nerdy, mild-mannered Gary, mellow tough guy Ron or any of Gary's other semi-improvised creations. True, the script spells out its theme of transformation a few too many times via Gary's philosophy lectures. But the actor makes us believe in Gary as one of those people who are freest when they're impersonating someone else.
The early scenes of Gary's encounters with a rogue's gallery of miscreants are good fun, full of colorful characters and absurd interactions. Living with one foot in academia and the other in the city's darker corners, he's like a law-abiding version of Walter White in "Breaking Bad." As Gary's sardonic, seen-it-all support team, Retta and Sanjay Rao are deliciously deadpan, and as his cop rival, whom Gary replaced as "hit man," Austin Amelio adds comic irascibility to the mix.
But when Madison shows up to test Gary's professionalism, the movie shifts into rom-com mode, and the cracks in its central conceit start to show. Arjona is as charming as Powell, and the two of them have palpable chemistry. Yet, starting from their meet-cute scene, very little about Madison's character adds up. One moment, she's all big sad eyes and tale of woe; the next, she's exchanging quips with Gary/Ron.
There's nothing wrong with depicting a downtrodden woman as having a sense of humor and a sex drive — on the contrary. The problem here is the whiplash, the lack of transitions. Madison is a whispery damsel in distress when the plot requires it, naïve when the plot requires it, tempestuous and sexy and hard-edged and cunning when the plot requires it. She feels like a construct, not a person with organic motivations.
Once we realize that, the rest of the story starts feeling just as artificial. Hit Man is a bit of a Frankenstein creation, with its rom-com sunniness straining against its more noir tendencies. Its final twist puts it in far more conventional territory than where it began. While the early scenes suggest that Gary can contain multitudes, subverting the whole concept of identity, the film's abrupt conclusion seems to affirm the same tiresome "rule of cool" as so many hit-man movies before it.
Still, there's something heartening about seeing a mainstream movie fail to pull off an audacious attempt at genre blending at a time when few filmmakers take such risks. Rom-com and noir verge on incompatible story types: One is all about welcoming your soulmate into your life, and the other is steeped in suspicion and betrayal. It's no shocker that Linklater fails to reconcile them. (If anyone ever has, it was Jonathan Demme with 1986's Something Wild.) For better or worse, Hit Man takes a shot at being unclassifiable, and in the algorithmically driven streaming universe, that counts for something.
Bernie (2011; Crackle, the CW, Fandango at Home, Peacock, PLEX, Pluto TV, Prime, Redbox, the Roku Channel, Sling TV, Tubi, rentable): Of all Linklater's films, Hit Man feels most akin to this dark small-town comedy starring Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine, perhaps because both were loosely based on Texas Monthly articles by Skip Hollandsworth.
The Nice Guys (2016; rentable): Here's a movie in a similar vein to Hit Man that might have found its audience on Netflix. If you enjoy shaggy-dog comedies with witty scripts, action-thriller elements and handsome leads, check out Shane Black's underseen gem, starring Ryan Gosling.
Miami Blues (1990; Pluto TV, Prime, Tubi, rentable): The '90s were rich in absurdist neo-noir movies, but this deep cut, featuring a twisted romance between Alec Baldwin and Jennifer Jason Leigh, deserves revisiting. Coincidentally, director George Armitage (Grosse Pointe Blank) made a 1972 flick called Hit Man.