What to Watch: "Hit Man," dammit. (Plus other new stuff)

Excuse the radio silence; I’ve been away for 10 days driving and hiking around the Scottish Highlands with Mrs. Movie Critic, and just got back yesterday, so I’m deeply out of the loop, new-movie wise. I intend to spend the coming week obsessively rewatching “Local Hero” and “I Know Where I’m Going!” while weeping quietly into my vegetarian haggis.

I am sad to have missed the screenings for “Mad Max: Furiosa” and look forward to catching up with the film in the next few days. But if you still haven’t seen Richard Linklater’s wonderful romantic crime comedy “Hit Man” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐), which makes good on all those predictions people (including me) have been making about Glen Powell’s breakthrough to stardom, know that it's one of the year's best, most entertaining films. It comes to Netflix next week but is still in theaters this weekend, and, trust me, this is a movie that plays well with a crowd. Allow me to re-run my Washington Post review, which went up while I was out of town:

Linklater’s ‘Hit Man’ deserves to be a hit, man

Glen Powell stars in a delightfully dark comedy that should make him a marquee name.

(Originally published in the Washington Post on May 23, 2024)

“Hit Man” is opening in theaters Friday and premiering on Netflix two weeks from now. You can watch it on the streaming service, of course, but the movie’s director, Richard Linklater, really wants you to watch it in a movie theater, and, honestly, so do I. A blast of pure pleasure and one of the year’s best films, “Hit Man” should be seen with a crowd grooving on its devilish comic energy, its off-the-charts sexual chemistry and the star-making turn at its center.

That star is Glen Powell, who’s been bumping up toward better things over the past few years, from the motormouthed college ballplayer in Linklater’s “Everybody Wants Some!!” (2016) to Tom Cruise’s rival in “Top Gun: Maverick” (2022) to romancing Sydney Sweeney in last year’s mush-brained romantic comedy “Anyone But You.” He has the lead in the “Twister” sequel due in July, but the whip-smart “Hit Man” is the one that should do the trick. Wit, sex appeal and crack comic timing — Powell’s got it all.

For that matter, so does his co-star Adria Arjona (“Andor”), but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Based very loosely on a true story, “Hit Man” casts Powell as Gary Johnson, a contentedly nerdy psychology professor at the University of New Orleans who moonlights as a technical adviser for police sting operations. When Jasper (Austin Amelio), the sketchy undercover cop who usually plays the fake killer-for-hire, is suspended, Gary is drafted to take his place at the last minute; to everyone’s surprise, including his own, the mild-mannered academic has a gift for posing as an ice-cold assassin. Soon he’s the department’s main “hit man,” changing his dress, hair and attitude for each of the lowlifes who are willing to pay to have someone removed. As Gary explains, hit men don’t much exist outside of the movies, but people fantasize that they do, and his job is to become the fantasy. “I had the knack,” he says, “of being the person they needed me to be.”

A movie like this has to have a complication, and in “Hit Man,” the complication’s name is Maddy (Arjona), a smoldering sweetie pie with an abusive husband (Evan Holtzman) whom the planet would really be better off without. That’s what she says, anyway, and maybe it’s true. When she meets Gary, who’s posing as a slick, affable professional killer named Ron, what starts as a business meeting turns into a date before either is entirely aware of what’s happening. It’s at this point that the movie shifts into a delightful second gear, as Gary’s — excuse me, Ron’s — attraction to Maddy, and hers to him, starts gumming up the works and adding layers to the imposture. Everyone seems to like Ron more than Gary — even Gary.

Beyond that, I can tell you no more, other than to say that “Hit Man” piles one twist upon another until we’re as unsure as Gary about which person he’s pretending to be, and for whom. To give the movie ballast, his day job in the classroom allows for some light philosophizing, Gary throwing his students curveballs like, “What if your self is a construction, a role you’ve been playing since you can remember?”

Fine, but this is first and foremost an entertainment, one made by people working at the top of their game while having the time of their lives. Linklater is one of our best, most independent-minded filmmakers, and every now and then, he drops the formal experiments of “Boyhood” or the “Before Sunrise” trilogy to turn out something perfectly commercial, like “School of Rock” or “Dazed and Confused,” just to remind us that he can. “Hit Man” isn’t commercial in the strict modern Hollywood sense — there’s no CGI and no chase scenes, and not a single gun is fired (on-screen, anyway). But the script, co-written by the director and the star, is the kind that flatters an audience’s senses of intelligence and humor, and the central romance isn’t just ridiculously hot but funny and sweet — two people sparking to each other’s rhythms as they reveal themselves step by step.

Which, of course, is a lie, since there’s more than enough pretending to go around. The gamesmanship between Ron and Maddy ultimately leads to a blissfully funny scene where the impostures and playacting acquire the stature of three-dimensional chess, with cellphone cues and an audience of law enforcement listening in. It’s one of those sequences you play back in your head after the movie is over, just to figure out how they did it.

The backcourt of “Hit Man” is stacked with talent as well, from Amelio’s lanky, live-wire sleazeball of a bad cop to Retta and Sanjay Rao as Gary’s deadpan associates in the sting operation, agreeing between themselves that they’d probably sleep with Ron if they had the chance. Everyone’s so likable, in fact, that it’s not until the movie’s over that you may realize you’ve been waltzed into an awfully dark ethical corner. You can talk about that on the drive home, too.

Goosing it all along is a soundtrack of rolling New Orleans R&B, heavy on the Dr. John, Professor Longhair and a sublime Allen Toussaint cover version of “Cast Your Fate to the Wind.” Appropriate title, that, since “Hit Man” is a fable about making it up as you go along, until you realize that you stopped being you about 10 miles back.

Also in theaters this week, “The Dead Don’t Hurt” (⭐ ⭐ 1/2), a neo-western as vaguely clunky as its title but certainly worth a look on the strength of its performances and its sneaky left-field feminist sucker punch. It’s the second movie to be written and directed by its star Viggo Mortensen and a big improvement over his first, 2020’s painful “Falling,” and when I saw it last fall at the Toronto International Film Festival, I wrote:

[Mortensen] plays a Danish immigrant farmer and sheriff of a small, ornery Nevada town run by a powerful judge (Danny Huston) and local rancher (Garrett Dillahunt). The real reason to see the movie is Vicky Krieps (“Phantom Thread”), above, as Mortensen’s wife, a free-spirited French Canadian whose individuality and strength represent a threat to the macho frontier code. A convoluted two-part chronology makes the drama rougher sledding than it needs to be – there’s a simpler, more elemental tale to be uncovered here – and the main antagonist (Solly McLeod) is a cartoon of sagebrush villainy, but the scenes between the immigrant husband and wife have a freshly felt tenderness and honesty that’s rare for the genre. Viggo’s getting better at this.

“Robot Dreams” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐, in theaters) was Oscar-nominated in 2023’s Feature Animation category and it’s a bittersweet doodle of a film that is stronger in concept than in the playing. In a whimsical cartoon New York City peopled entirely by animals, a lonely dog in need of a friend sends away for a mail-order robot, leading to a plangent comedy-drama of misunderstandings, missed connections, and something like love. It’s a relationship allegory where the allegory part is more resonant than the story itself and the whole thing struck me as rather ... mild. But a lot of people love this movie, so maybe I'm just a grinch.

Recently On Demand:

“Challengers” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2, renting for $14.99 on Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube, and elsewhere). A fine, frisky romantic-drama three-way, delivered with sensuality and style by director Luca Guadagnino ("Call Me by Your Name") and stars Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O'Connor.

“The Fall Guy” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐, renting for $19.99 on Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube, and elsewhere) Funnier, sweeter, and smarter than it deserves to be thanks to Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, who turn a meat-headed action comedy (based very loosely on the old Lee Majors TV show) into a disarming romantic comedy.

“Sasquatch Sunset” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2, renting for $5.99 on Amazon, Apple TV, and elsewhere) Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, and co-director Nathan Zellner play the last Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) roaming the Pacific Northwest in this oddly elegiac slapstick nature documentary. As I said in the WaPo, "the existence of a movie where Elvis Presley’s granddaughter plays a Bigfoot is either a sign of the end times or a reminder that we live in the greatest country on Earth."

Classic of the Week: “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2) – Coming in July is a new documentary about the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, a.k.a. The Archers, whose films (“The Red Shoes,” “Black Narcissus,” “I Know Where I’m Going!”) are among the glories of film history, but if you can’t wait, catch their epic 1943 adaptation of a British cartoon character – a forerunner of Monty Python's Upper Class Twit – into a surpassingly moving drama of a man slowly watching the times leave him behind. It’s on TCM at 3:00 A.M. Saturday morning (set your DVR) or you can watch it on Max, the Criterion Channel, Prime Video, and elsewhere.

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