Hit Movie?

Glen Powell is one of Hollywood's more recently-minted pretty boys. While he has popped up in the occasional popcorn movie I've watched, I never had the impression he was much of an actor until I streamed Hit Man on Netflix.

Hit Man is very loosely based on the true story of Gary Johnson, a mild-mannered college professor who works on the side for the police department. One day, he's made to step into a sting operation and pose as a contract killer. When he proves surprisingly adept at this, the one-off performance becomes a regular gig. Then one sting brings unexpected complications, as he becomes tangled up in the case, romantically involved with "the mark," and made to keep pretending to be someone he's not.

My route into Hit Man was knowing that it was a movie co-written and directed by Richard Linklater. He's made movies I've hated, but many more that I've truly loved. (And that's not even getting into Dazed and Confused, which many people seem to revere.) I feel I can rely on a Linklater movie to at least be worth a shot.

I didn't know that star Glen Powell was the other co-writer on this project, nor that he'd probably helped Linklater craft this as a vehicle to show what he can do as an actor that his other projects hadn't tapped. In that respect, Hit Man is a surprising success. The story essentially has him playing two characters -- the real Gary Johnson and his dangerous alter ego "Ron." And on top of that, we get tastes of a dozen other one-off hit man personas, each a fun little riff on a rapid-fire improv sketch premise. It turns out, Glen Powell can act!

But since he's purportedly half of the team responsible for this script, the bigger question might be: can he write? I think the answer is... mostly? Movies tend to have a three-act structure, but Hit Man is unusual in that each of those acts feels stylistically like a completely different movie. It starts as an undercover cop story, albeit one clearly striking a comedic tone. By act two, it has become a rom-com, the quirky and light tones lingering even as the real meat of the story arrives. But in the final act, Hit Man almost becomes a film noir -- a much more serious movie with many of the character and plot conventions of the "hard-boiled" genre.

It seems as though the movie's north star is to try to keep you guessing. Every time it changes modes, it settles in just long enough for you to think, "okay, I think I'm on this wavelength," before suddenly changing everything up again. And while it is refreshing to not feel like you know every twist a story is going to take, Hit Man takes some wild swings, especially in the last 30 minutes.

Still, I can make the case for each "segment" of this movie being worthy and entertaining. The cast helps a lot here. When Hit Man wants more than anything else to be amusing, Retta and Sanjay Rao are there, playing a pair of police officers with truly funny banter. When it wants to be a romance, Adria Arjona is there as Glen Powell's romantic foil, giving a solid performance and generating all kinds of chemistry with her screen partner. When then movie wants to be suspenseful, Austin Amelio and Evan Holtzman are two weaselly characters each posing a separate danger to the main character.

The result is that Hit Man is both an oddity you can't easy compare to one single movie. ("If you liked that, you'll love Hit Man!") But it's a movie with perhaps half a dozen different in-roads. ("If you liked that -- or that, or that, or that -- maybe you'll like Hit Man.") I give it a B.