HIT MAN

Based (and the based is important, let's not get into Baby Reindeer territory here) on the true story of  Gary Johnson, Hit Man follows college professor Gary (Glen Powell), who supplements his teaching income by helping the police department with sting operations.

Masquerading as a professional assassin Gary tries to elicit murder-for-hire confessions from would-be customers.

Things, however, begin to go awry when Gary - pretending to be professional hit man Ron - begins to fall in love with Madison (Adria Arjona), a subjugated housewife who wants to pay Gary to kill her controlling husband.

The first thing to say is what a brilliant premise for a film this is, and Hit Man has some great fun in the opening act with Gary, in different disguises each time, soliciting customers before sending them to jail. 

Each of the customers feels different, though ghastly in their own ways, and the different personalities Gary inhabits are great fun.

And this idea of inhabiting different personalities, and the potential to morph from one into another, is something that runs through the entire film, making me wish I had even a rudimentary understanding of Freud's Ego and Id theory.

This is clearly an important plot point. Gary teaches Philosophy and Psychology and even has cats called Ego and Id, so it’s clear that having some background knowledge of this going in would have helped. Not that I didn’t enjoy Hit Man regardless, I just think I would have enjoyed it more if I had this. You often get out of a film what you take into it, and in this case the opposite may also be true.

Hit Man does, however, begin to sag a little in the middle when we start to focus on Gary and Madisons burgeoning relationship. Narratively this has to happen, of course, but I was having so much fun with the sting operation side of the film, it was disappointing when this had to take a back seat.

And that’s not to say there isn’t some good work happening here. The script is extremely tight, and Arjona and Powell (In these scenes playing Ron) have great chemistry, it’s just that on a personal level the “job side” of the film was the bit that I enjoyed the most.

But again, I guess it comes back to the idea of different personalities. Different worlds. That we get to spend the opening act with one side of Gary’s personality, and then the second with his alter-ego, before they start edging ever closer to a collision.

And as this starts to happen, as all begins threatening to collapse, the fun really starts to crank up.

In this final act the strengths of the film premise really begin to show, and I have to admit that, for all I didn’t enjoy it as much when they were happening, the time we spent with Madison and Gary (or Ron) as a couple pays off here.

Glen Powell is fantastic in these moments. Often having to switch from Gary to Ron in the blink of an eye and then straight back again. Sometimes having to inhabit both personalities at exactly the same time. It is not an easy feat to pull this off but Powell manages it with ease.

He manages to make each personality subtly unique so that you are never left wondering who he is playing in any given moment, without the film having to spell it out for you.

Richard Linklaters breezy direction allows room for the actors and the script to shine, and his lightness of touch means that even some of the more contrived moments feel absolutely natural.

This is a dark comedy disguised as a mainstream Hollywood romp. As Gary spends most of the film inhabiting two different personalities, so too does the film itself. It is one thing, presenting as another, and it will have its cake and eat it by attracting audiences from both. Linklater deserves immense credit for this.

I do have some issues with the closing moments of the film. I obviously won’t go into them in detail here, but it did, to me at least, feel like a somewhat easy out. Like screenwriters enjoying the journey so much they didn’t give quite enough thought to the destination, but in the grand scheme of things, when the journey is so much fun, this is a minor quibble. 

Not without its flaws (and admittedly some of those flaws were my own), but Hit Man is a darkly funny, yet still accessible, comedy drama with a great leading performance from Glen Powell.

Netflix films do, understandably, get a bit of a bad rap, but this is one that is absolutely worth your time.

(And any film that references In Bruges is always going to get a thumbs up from me)