Hit Man (2023)
First screened and reviewed in September 2024
Director: Richard Linklater. Cast: Glen Powell, Adria Arjona, Austin Amelio, Retta, Sanjay Rao, Gralen Bryant Banks, Evan Holtzman, Molly Bernard, Mike Markoff. Screenplay: Ricahrd Linklater and Glen Powell (based on a magazine article by Skip Hollandsworth). VOR:③
Nice to see a tailored script, vivid day players, a curious genre-splice, a charming and sexy adult duo. These things should be less rare.
I'm all for good-will-hunting yourself a script that delivers the character type and invites the tone that interest you—especially if you've been holding steady for 20 years since your first screen credit to see things take off, and you're buddied up with cowriter/director with a proven yen for collaboration and a knack for getting oddball, low-budget character studies off the ground. My good will has been good and well hunted. And the script of Hit Man is handily the best thing about it: intricate without being exhausting, personality-driven despite a tight plot, larkish but with an intriguing, Body Heat darkness right down its middle.
You could make some comparable claims about Magic Mike, the Tatum-Soderbergh brainchild that rejuvenated its director/midwife/co-conspirator and lifted the actor/coauthor that extra mile into the double role of fan favorite and genuine industry player. But Tatum makes me lean further toward the screen than Powell does, curious about what exactly is inside that head and that frame. He's got a wavelength and something like a point of view. Powell might be more skilled as an actor but he's less tangible to me as a person, a performer, or a presence, even when he's good.
Quite obviously, part of Hit Man's design involves a parade of alter egos where Powell gets to sell us on different looks, voices, energies, and ranges. The message in this Texas whiskey bottle is written just as much to casting agents as to audiences, but I still leave Hit Man less than positive where I'd put Powell next. I have more ideas and excitement for where else Adria Arjona might wind up, given her charismatic, involving, and much more direct approach to a character who makes less sense on the page (and whose more ...complicated dimensions the actress admittedly short-sells). Some of the supporting cast also caught my eye more than Powell did: Retta, Sanjay Rao, and a few of the sting-operation targets, most of them single-sceners. If Hit Man's job was to sell me on Powell, then it's a bit like a car ad where I leave thinking about the scenic roadway, the lush firs along the shoulder, the comely driver, the attractive house at the end of its path. The car itself was fine! Good-looking vehicle. Fine hum to its engine. But I'm still shopping.
Let's be clear, though, that I did have a reasonably good time watching Hit Man. There's one late-ish sequence that lifts the whole project (talk to me while you read my phone) that I'm amazed I haven't seen before and that both performers really nail. That scene spawns a twisty sequel that also slaps, suggesting a movie that's building to a strong finish. It doesn't. But I'll take what I can get, including from Richard Linklater's direction: modest enough to make plenty of room for local flavor and human color, wan enough to make me wish for a little more steering and tension, and more care about framing, lighting, and other areas of moviemaking.
Soderbergh might have imposed his style too hard on this script, whereas Linklater signs his name so lightly in No.2 pencil that you can't quite make it out on the carbon copies. That's sort of the paradox of Hit Man: it feels intensely strategized, assiduously written, yet weakly authored. A nifty and likeable passion project, but it never elevated its own heart rate or mine as fully as I'd expected. Grade:B–
