Where Texas Monthly's Hit Man ends, Richard Linklater's Hit Man begins
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
Murder for hire. Almost.
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The story
It feels like we started hearing about Hit Man ages ago, with critics at film festivals speaking well of it when it played at TIFF and elsewhere. Enough time had gone by that I actually had to do some quick research to remind myself whether Richard Linklater's latest had enough of an IRL basis to qualify it for review around here. It does – Skip Hollandsworth profiled the real Gary Johnson, who passed in 2022, in an October 2001 piece for Texas Monthly – but re-reading the Hollandsworth, I wondered whether Linklater could pull off an adaptation that uses the original reporting as more of a jumping-off point than a blueprint.
And I wondered how he'd make a traditionally plotted narrative out of a piece about a mild-mannered, intellectually curious cipher who posed as a hit man on behalf of a police department…especially when it's now a truth almost universally agreed upon* that freelance hit men do not exist, and that if you have agreed to meet/treat with one, you are dealing with the police.
Although the professional hit man is a staple of detective fiction, no one is really certain if there is someone in this country who makes a living as a hired gun. Organized crime families and drug syndicates have employees who will do whatever their bosses tell them to do, which often includes firing machine guns at certain rivals or burying them in cement. And there are the occasional wannabe mercenaries who take out ads in the backs of military magazines claiming that they will do anything asked of them. But they almost always turn out to be frauds.
Skip Hollandsworth, "Hit Man"
*I think it was Bill James who grumbled somewhere in Popular Crime that every "hit man" "hired" by a frustrated spouse ends up being a UC.
I suppose you could go with a collage, a 33 ⅓ Short Films About Hits That Missed approach. That's not the direction Hit Man takes, although it does wisely hang a light on the graf above. Eve talked to Linklater about the process, and how he and Glen Powell (who also stars here) "took the end of the [Texas Monthly] article and we just kept going" in the Hit Man screenplay, for Vanity Fair. My job is to tell you whether they should have, and while it's not quite a masterpiece, it's a very good, very watchable two hours.
Part of that is down to the film's leads. Top Gun: Maverick's Powell plays Gary, a civilian employee of the police department who discovers he has a gift for impersonating hit men, then eliciting actionable confessions from murderous "clients." Adria Arjona (Andor) is Madison, a prospective "customer" whom Gary ends up falling in love with, albeit in the persona of "Ron," the most cinematically Gosling-esque of his guises. Without Powell's and Arjona's chemistry, the intricate braid of comedic-noir plotting that ensues once Gary and "Ron" start to bleed together (uh, as it were) falls apart.
In a "truth is stranger than"-esque tale like Hit Man's, it's also crucial that we buy each actor separately. Arjona plays Madison's blossoming from a flinchy, frustrated wife who doesn't see a way out into a sexy and confident bedroom cosplayer perfectly. Powell is credible as an earnest community-college philosophy instructor who wears mandals and bores his colleagues about birding, but also as a Stefon-esque Brit with a terrible wig, a skeet-shooting hillbilly, and of course the foxy but fundamentally sweet Ron.
The entire cast is tops – Retta and Sanjay Rao as Gary's colleagues, who are also hilariously taken with "Ron"; The Walking Dead-verse's Austin Amelio as Jasper, a cop whose disgrace game recognizes game – and the script's confidence in the last third as it weaves in the ends of various double-crosses is critical.
But what really makes Hit Man a winner is its tone. Bernie, another Linklater/Hollandsworth joint whose logline is basically "get a load of this mofo," succeeded for similar reasons, IMO, namely that the writing avoids easy targets. These misguided people, and the floridly weird situations they create around themselves, are funny – but the writers telling their stories don't make fun of them. …Okay, maybe they do a little, but it's fond teasing; there's empathy for their utterly human desperations and tunnel visions. Hit Man genuinely likes its characters and wants them to do better. Or…less badly.
The movie's got some slack in the runtime: probably one too many scenes underlining Madison's new "persona" as a nookie-forward single; maybe one too many classroom sequences in which Gary's history-of-philosophy lesson plan asterisks the script's conflicts; definitely too many interstitial shots of on-the-nose street signs. But it doesn't sink to check-your-phone levels, and anyway, Linklater films tend to have their own internal rhythms and the viewer kind of unconsciously adjusts to that. Hit Man is a compelling sit – and a great example of a creative team listening carefully to a true-crime story, locating the "true," and taking the crime story from there.