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If Glen Powell’s Not Already a Star, This Movie Will Make Him One
Richard Linklater’s Hit Man is a genuinely fresh and surprisingly gentle addition to the assassin genre.
It’s a wild story that an opening title tells us is “somewhat true”: Johnson (a real guy) worked for a while for the New Orleans Police Department as a fake hit man for its sting operations, arriving at arranged meetings wearing a wire and then getting the suspects to incriminate themselves by obtaining his services. A lot of very dumb things have been said about the auteur theory in recent years, all of which ignore its beautiful central tenet, which is that some filmmakers’ sensibilities shine through their work no matter the material. If one were in the habit of playing artists off one another, one could even say that Hit Man serves as a rebuke to the other hit-man movies at Venice this year — to the self-conscious portent of David Fincher’s The Killer, or the graphic tedium of Harmony Korine’s Aggro Dr1ft.
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