★★

Richard Linklater and Glen Powell are not deep thinkers.  Hit Man would be a much better film if they understood that.

Linklater in particular has never evolved in his musings about life, human needs, and the sense of self after one, no more than two, semesters of college.  If he took more than that, he should sue his alma mater for his money back.  The most memorable image in Hit Man is a pair of street signs on the corner Law & Desire, followed later by the corner of Piety & Pleasure.  But all these images mean is that the city of New Orleans has more imagination and connection with the people who live there than he does.

Hit Man features Gary Johnson (Powell) – a real life school teacher and part-time fake hitman who met with people looking to solicit his murderous services and obtained their confessions.  Gary is initially advertised by the film as a square living anywhere from one to two decades behind everyone else with his sense of dress and fashion, and while in a police surveillance van he must suddenly adopt the persona of a hitman in place of the lead detective.  He is far too good at this, which the film understands only as a comedic situation.  This is the first flaw.  Who is this Gary and why is he like this?  I know it’s not because of Nietzsche because if there’s one thing Powell either can’t or won’t bring to this character it’s a sense of passion.

Powell is a good actor, but he’s best served in a role where you never see him bleed.  He’s too effortless, too convincing, and too confident in whatever he’s about to say next, which undermines the gravity of any moment where you think his character is in a sticky situation.  The reason this is a criticism is because Hit Man complements his natural form with the way it tells Gary Johnson’s “somewhat true” story to the detriment of the supposedly bigger ideas it aims to convey.  It wants to suggest that the academic way he treats his undercover assignments is an application of the philosophy lessons he’s imparting to his students, but there is no connective tissue between or juxtaposition of class sessions to situations.  There is only the pretense of such.  In the classroom, he teaches living dangerously, Freud’s theory of how the mind manages the relationship between human desire and his understanding of the boundaries and rules in which he exists, ancient and modern theories of social and cultural justice when society can no longer tolerate a predator, and how it somehow all leads to happiness, and nothing about the rest of the movie naturally connects all that disparate material with Gary’s exploits.

At least The Matrix: Reloaded – another film with awkward, disconnected, forced, and unnaturalistic musings on philosophy, choice, fate, reality, and revolution – knew how to show a confused, uncertain, and conflicted protagonist.  Linklater merely feigns cleverness and depth – mentioning names for no purpose but to impress film festival attendees who crave assurance that they read and totally understood that one philosophy essay they read in college.  Hit Man is not altogether entirely without its enjoyable moments, and it’s certainly preferable to Linklater’s petulant slacker movie subgenre (Slacker and Boyhood).  Linklater will never make a film that doesn’t have at least one conversation between two people about self consciousness, but his two best films (Before Sunset and Everybody Wants Some!!) were the least insufferable in part because his characters were so pressed for time and in a hurry to express themselves.  Linklater tapped into something in all of us in the way he tracked Jesse and Céline through Paris and Jake, Finn, Dale, Roper, McReynolds, Nez, Plum, and Beverly through campus on opening weekend.  But in Hit Man, this dual-operating philosophy/psychology professor and undercover sting artist has far too much time on his hands, and when the film turns his sexual motivation into role play, it means only what’s on the screen, nothing else.

Probably the film’s worst decision is its happy ending.  If Linklater really thought that Hit Man meant something beyond Gary’s funny encounters with danger, he’d have ended the film in a way that was truer to Gary Johnson’s real life and mirrored the profile of a tortured philosopher – alone and depressed like Nietzsche, hunted like Freud, or delirious like Jung.  But the film gets progressively stupider, less plausible, and emptier as it winds to its final climax, and no injection of discussions about the id, ego, superego, or suggestion of internal family reprogramming – as interesting as any of these things are in the abstract – can save it.

As charming as Powell is, Hit Man is a barely pulsating romcom and a class you can skip.

– Vivek