transmission eighteen - "hit man" review

screwball comedies... welcome back

adria arjona and glenn powell in “hit man”

richard linklater is one of those directors that just has a voice I click with completely. hearing his latest movie would star “top gun: maverick”'s glenn Powell and “andor”'s adria arjona (daughter of ricardo arjona, for some latino psychic damage) had me incredibly excited, though significantly less so when the film was acquired by netflix, and spent months and months in netflix jail until they finally had a good window to release it in. still, we've made it to the “hit man” release date, and I couldn't be happier.

glenn powell plays gary, a philosophy professor who's kind of a nerd, not exactly a social butterfly, and who moonlights working in an undercover team for the police. specifically, they fake hit-men encounters with people, entrapping them into trying to hire them, and thus obtaining audio evidence of the fact that they tried to hire someone to commit a killing. when the man who actually stands in for the fake hit-man is temporarily out of commission, it's up to good ol' gary to discover that he actually has a fantastic talent for getting into character, for tailoring each fake hit man to what the person expects, and getting them prosecuted.

I intentionally had not looked up much about the film – i'm not averse to spoilers unless we're specifically talking about mystery fiction, but I like linklater well enough to know i'd probably like this latest one. hence, I went into it as blind as I could, and I got a really breezy, dark romantic comedy that takes after screwball comedies in a way I haven't seen in the mainstream in a long while. a lot of the time, it feels like linklater is either making hangout movies, or movies that feel like they could be hangout movies with a little less plot. this one is the latter, and it's linklater's realistic dialogue that makes it feel like the former at times.

the dialogue is a big part of why the movie is so enjoyable, especially because it's a bit of a tough premise: selling the love story between a man who is pretending to be a fake hit-man and the woman that he helped avoid jail while undercover. it's a challenging premise, bringing to mind scenarios that in real life would be considered assault, and are not straightforward things to sell to an audience. however, the movie deftly handles it, moving at such a breezy pace, and with characters that are equally likeable and manipulative, that the premise is never really any sort of issue. it all culminates in a fantastic climax, in one of the best scenes i've seen in a movie all year, and I was grinning the entire time.

I think it's lovely to have a romantic comedy that feels like it punches above the weight of the genre nowadays. these days these films don't have the chokehold on culture that they used to. sometimes, through sheer force of marketing power, a movie like “anyone but you” will push itself into the center of attention (also co-starring glenn powell!) but that's rarer and rarer these days. i'm not saying that “hit-man” is a movie that will cement itself into culture as one of the classics. if there's any justice at all in this world, it will at least serve to continue glenn powell's hot streak, and thrust adria arjona into superstardom as well. but “hit man” doesn't feel like a romantic comedy made to be distributed by netflix, made to fill a gap in the netflix summer schedule, so that they can release something every week, forever. it feels like a Movie. it takes after screwball comedies of old, with misunderstandings, farcical situations, and jokes that ultimately make the romance aspect hit quite a bit more. if you want to watch a funny, lightly dark romantic comedy, I can’t recommend it enough.