What you see at the start of Hit Man, the Summer comedy directed by Richard Linklater is the truth; the film is loosely based on the life of Gary Johnson who taught in a college and moonlighted as a fake hit man working undercover for the authorities. Glen Powell plays Gary whose alter ego Rom ensnares their victims and wears a wire as they detail who they want the fake Hit Man to ‘hit’ next. Powell’s character gets all tangled up in his own web when he advises a girl he liked who wanted to knock off her husband, and ends up closer to the life of a hit man than he ever would have liked. What they tell you at the end of the film is that the real Gary didn’t actually kill anyone, which is a nice touch thank god.
The idea came to Richard Linklater as he discovered a 2001 article about the strange and unusual life of Gary. The article ended when the real life Gary advised the girl against her plan of enlisting his services, which Linklater didn’t think was much of a movie. Fellow Texas native Glen Powell happened to have read the source material too when he and Linklater connected and they began to collaborate together during Covid on developing the script and enhancing the narrative by reintroducing the female character back into Gary’s life. Powell, known most recently for the runaway hit Anyone But You ‘saved a step’ for Linklater by collaborating with him on the script, such is the director’s known technique of essentially rewriting the script in rehearsals with actors anyway.
The mash up of genres is evident and Linklater references this during the Q&A when he said that it would be too predictable to go down the neo-noir route. That in all fairness was a genre that was underpinned by the expected moralities of the Hayes Code, and with this film they avoided the ‘black widow’ trope of the man getting tangled in a web by an evil woman that should have been avoided at all costs in the first place.
It’s definitely a change of course from Linklater’s most well known work like the Before trilogy, Dazed and Confused and Boyhood, but it is fresh and handled well. He also is undergoing another one of his extended time lapse films that is set to last for another couple of decades so he has to push out a few commercial hits in the mean time to keep the lights on
Hit Man hits theatrical screens today, and will be available on Netflix on Friday 7th June
FILM FOR THOUGHT 