'Hit Man' is the Movie Version of 'Inventing a Guy to Get Mad At'
'Hit Man' is the Movie Version of 'Inventing a Guy to Get Mad At'
Linklater's latest, starring Glen Powell, is based on a true story, but it's all too obvious which parts were made up.
Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since I started FilmDrunk in 2007. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.
-
I can’t remember which Weird Twitter user coined the phrase “inventing a guy to get mad at,” but it’s one of those instantly recognizable online phenomena you’ll start to notice everywhere once it has a name. Richard Linklater’s latest film, Hit Man, for Netflix, isn’t specifically a portrait of a guy to get mad at (A Confederacy of Dunces might be the greatest literary example of this) but its plot does hinge on a character whose sole purpose is to be dislikable enough that the audience won’t mind if he’s murdered. Cheering it on feels hollow, in about the same way as a quote-tweet dunk on a bot with 47 followers.
Linklater is rightly considered a filmmaking legend at this point, with Dazed and Confused, School of Rock, Boyhood, and the Sunrise/Sunset trilogy to his credit. He paved his fellow Austin-ite Glen Powell’s path to stardom by casting Powell in his semi-autobiographical seventies baseball movie, Everybody Wants Some!! [sic]. Now Powell is back, after becoming something approaching a bona fide movie star, to return some of the glow, headlining Linklater’s latest, which Powell also co-wrote (with Linklater and Skip Hollandsworth).
The general feel-goodness of this story and Powell’s boyish charm probably go a long way towards explaining Hit Man’s universally positive reviews. The vibes are good, carrying Hit Man along until right up to the time when it has to pay the piper. And then it sort of falls apart. It’s one of those movies that works fine as long as you don’t think about it too much.
One of the most salient parts of Everybody Wants Some!! was its depiction of college as a place where you get to test-drive different identities. Hit Man takes a similar concept and applies it to a slightly older guy, Gary Johnson (played by Powell, and based on a real guy who was probably much less handsome), a boring dorky college psychology professor who drives a Honda Civic and has two cats named Id and Ego. Powell needs the Honda and the cats and jorts to make him dorky the same way 90s teen comedy heroines needed glasses and ponytails to read as outcasts. They’re sort of charmingly unconvincing in the same way — we don’t want actual outcasts to play outcasts, we want the actors with pouty lips and jawlines chiseled from Italian marble.
When he’s not teaching classes at the “University of New Orleans,” Gary moonlights with the police department, using his tech skills to help stage sting operations to catch people trying to set up murders for hire. Hitmen, we learn in the first five minutes of Hit Man, aren’t a thing that exists outside of movies and TV shows. But cops are all too happy to perpetuate the myth in order to entrap potential killers. Revealing that Hit Man doesn’t have any hitmen in it in the first five minutes is a bold choice that works.
In one of the first scenes, the cop who usually pretends to be the hitman can’t do it, on account of he’s been suspended “for that time he got caught jacking up those teenagers” — in the words of the other two cops on the operation, Claudette and Phil (Retta and Sanjay Rao).
I don’t know how it makes sense that a suspended cop can’t take part in a sting operation but a guy who isn’t even a cop at all can, but like I said, it works fine as long as you don’t think about it (it’s also the first scene, an easy time to suspend disbelief). So somehow the job of pretending to be a hitman falls to dorky Glen, who ends up being surprisingly convincing. It seems that all his work trying to understand the concept of the self and the human psyche has given him preternatural skills as an actor and confidence man. And so now, thanks to this little side hustle, Gary gets to do what Jake did in Everybody Wants Some!! and test-drive some different identities.
There’s a fun little montage showing Gary designing his different personae based on the person soliciting the hit. It’s hard to tell whether this suits Powell so well because he’s a great actor, or simply because he’s cute, such that watching him put on different costumes is fun in the same way as putting hats on a doggy. He thinks he’s people! Powell has always had intense pornstar energy, so dressing him up as different fantasies feels like his natural form.
A complication eventually arrives in the form of Madison (Adria Arjona), the desperate wife of an abusive husband whom Gary suddenly feels guilty for entrapping. Is it the abusive husband that makes Gary grow a conscience or the fact that Madison is… you know… so hot? That it’s impossible to say makes it an interesting conundrum, along with the forbidden nature of falling for someone with a track record of wanting to kill a lover. The best actors have that quality of making you fall in love with them, and Arjona has that in spades, plus a little something extra that makes you wonder if falling for her is a great idea, a terrible one, or so alluring precisely because it’s such a terrible idea. For all the talk of Hit Man being Powell’s coronation, it’s Arjona who steals most of their scenes together.