At this heart of this most lacklustre of films sits an intrinsically appealing idea.
That if we are unhappy with our current selves, and want to make a change to who we are and how we live life, then all we have to do is live it out and we become it.
Hit Man, from the justly well-regarded Richard Linklater, has some lofty ideas of spirited reinvention tucked away in its shambolic narrative, powered by a Nietzsche quote which kicks off the film:
… the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves!
It is quoted by the film’s protagonist, Gary Johnson (Glen Powell), a mild-mannered discount store wearing college professor of philosophy and psychology who eggs his students onto to seize that damn day on your own f**king terms even as he returns home in his beige Honda Civic each night to his cats, his boring dinners and a life most unadventurous and as un war-like as you can get.
That philosophising writ large leads you to expect a fiendishly brilliant and clever comedy which pivots on the appealing idea that you are not stuck with a life most normal but that change of the most revolutionary kind is possible, and this being a comedy, awkwardly funny as you messily adjust to being someone you were once not.
And while Gary gets that chance in the most preposterous way when his undercover electronics work the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) becomes far more front-of-house and he’s thrust into the role with no warning of fake hitman who has to ensnare would be murderers-by-proxy and stop their murderous intentions in their tracks.
Frankly, this should be the first warning sign, the first of many, many red flags.
A man who has the personality of a wet sock and the life goals of an ambitionless hermit and who has no training as a police operative at all is suddenly given the chance by Claudette (Retta), the police officer in change of the sting operation, to pretend to be someone else to ensnare desperate people breaking the law. (The reason he’s suddenly plucked from the back of the man that monitors all the recordings which are later used in legal proceedings is because the NOPD has unaccountably suspended, mid-operation, their chief undercover fake-hitman, Jasper (Austin Amiello) for some pretty sleazy dealings. Surely you’d wait until the undercover op is done and dusted?)
Unsurprisingly in this mildly amusing film that is utterly unhinged from anything approaching reality, Gary turns out to be a natural, able to use his understanding of human psychology and love of impersonating a diverse range of personalities to b ring in would-be-hitman-hirers by the metric ton.
Huzzah and hooray for utterly reckless, likely illegal and poorly thought out decision by the defenders of law and order!
Gary’s life is thus transformed, and while you know it has to get a lot more messy and complicated thanks to a less than subtle trailer, Hit Man at this point looks like a love letter to the joys of finding something new and liberating within yourself.
Then Gary, in the persona of suave handsome Ron the hitman – apparently “Gary” is a daggy man but “Ron” is all kinds of sexy and alluring; name books take note, please – meets Madison Figueroa Masters (Adsria Arjona), a meek-and-mild wife of a coercive controlling husband who is so desperate to escape the gendered violence that rules her life that she’s willing to contract a hitman.
But good old Gary aka Ron is instantly smitten, and rather than bringing in her in, she convinces her to just run away and leave hubby alone and thus not become another notch on Gary’s belt of fantastically over-the-top convictions.
Yes, my friends, the ill-trained undercover police operative lets someone go from what becomes less an act of ensnarement than a meet-cute and while romantic fun and games thus ensue so do the complications that come from Gary aka Ron – he is more and more the latter leading two of his students to quip “When did our professor become hot?” – pretending to be someone he most manifestly is not.
Is he newly fulfilled? Yes. Is he HOT? Indisputably yes. But does that it all lead to the comedy/rom-com/philosophy-lite movie of our streaming dreams?
It does not; instead what we get in Hit Man is a film that has no idea what it wants to be, that fills its narrative with leaps in logic and great bounds away from believability such that moments that could have been very clever jaunts into the perils of reckless reinvention and moral ambiguity become damn squibs of extreme, pointless silliness.
There are no real consequences to any of Gary/Ron’s stupidly realised actions, and while yay for unexpected real love and newly horizons in life, the murders, deceit and lack of integrity on an epic scale at the heart of it rob the film of any real sense of fun or any satisfactions of character arcs well realised.
Instead, you spend much of your time wondering what the hell Gary/Ron is thinking, and really what everyone behind this mess of a movie was thinking too, and while, yes, comedies should be very silly flights of unrealistic fantasy, they should at least have some sense of grounding in something approaching real life especially if you’re Hit Man and you’re quoiting goddamn Nietzsche at the start of your film.
While reinventing yourself is a good and glorious thing that everyone should aim to do once in their lives, it’s probably best if you don’t take Hit Man and Gary/Ron as your template, and instead go for something that actually makes narrative sense, has sense of real emotional resonance and doesn’t involve murder, deceit and decisions so poorly though-out and executed that going to a life of cats and TV dinner might indeed be the better option. (Oh, and the film is supposedly based on the life of a true person who did none of the stupid things Gary did making you wonder why they even invoked this real person at all.)