The Hitman

The Hitman (Richard Linklater, 2024) demonstrates the continued vitality of film noir.  Linklater's Netflix picture is an audience-pleasing trifle but it's fiendishly well-written and ingenious.  The staples of film noir are obvious:  a sexually insecure, naive man becomes entangled with a femme fatale and the plot toys with philosophical concepts relating to the mutability of identity and the ancient concept that character is destiny.  Characters are reliably motivated by lust and greed and, ultimately, the webs of deception that they spin threaten to entrap them.  Although the plot is recognizably noir, similar to Double Indemnity and a hundred other pictures of this sort, the film's tone isn't dire -- it's an entertainment that is blithe, sunny, and cheerfully amoral.  The picture is pretty good, better than okay, but it's not the masterpiece that some critics claim it to be. (But see my observations at the end of this note.) The movie is probably most notable for introducing its lead, Glen Powell, a versatile, engaging, and exceedingly handsome actor to the world -- it's a break-out role and, of course, we shall see much more of this performer.  Powell can impersonate all sorts of characters, and, like Cary Grant in films like Ball of Fire can play a nerdish introvert and romantic heartthrob with equal aplomb.  (The film is a vehicle for Powell; it was written by the actor with Linklater.)

The film's premise is mildly subversive with respect to the whole genre of paid assassin movies.  (It's productive to compare the comic inflections of this movie with the heavy breathing and portentous The Killer, David Fincher's 2023 paid assassin movie -- The Hit Man much better since it refuses to take itself and its premise seriously; on the other hand, viewed objectively, The Hit Man is far more nihilistic and, even, disturbing than Fincher's genre piece.)  The Hit Man argues, in voice-over, that, in fact, paid assassins of this sort don't exist and have never existed; the concept is fantasy exploited by law enforcement to entrap people with murderous intent; in fact, the movie asserts that the police have, more or less, invented the notion of the contract killer to ensnare ineffectual boobs who would probably be annoying but not dangerous if not afforded an opportunity to imagine a homicidal solution to their problems.  By far the best parts of the movie are the comic scenes in which the hero, adopting a variety of transparently fraudulent disguises and identities, entraps fools who think they are transacting business with a real killer.  Powell's comedy stylings in the scenes establishing the plot are excellent; he's very funny pretending to be all sorts of malign characters that his victims imagine to be professional contract killers.  The people ensnared are fools, often shown squinting in their mug shots with slack-jawed bemusement; they think that they can have loved-ones slaughtered for ridiculously cheap sums -- the initial entrapment involves a five-thousand dollar cash transaction (in two installments no less) and one kid plots for the murder of his own mother, offering eighty dollars and a handful of change and about dozen used DVDS  as the contract price.  Linklater is a subtle and thoughtful film maker and, upon reflection, his bite is always worse than his bark -- the cops are corrupt, inducing idiots into criminal transactions. Human life is cheap.  And our romantic hero is a liar and a fraud.  The movie is casually daring -- at one point, there is a lecture endorsing, as a thought experiment mind you, the legitimacy of "targeted killing", that is, political assassination and one expects that, at least, some of the film's audience may view this scene as suggestive in light of our present political environment -- I don't observe anyone pointing this out, but I think the message is unmistakable, but, also, in this context, another aspect of the entrapment that the picture establishes as morally incoherent and, even, malign.  (Is the movie suggesting that the answer to our political woes is murder or is this just another instance of planting idiot ideas in the minds of morons.)

Because the film's plot complications are serpentine and, often, surprising, I won't attempt to summarize the story.  In fact, the narrative is very intricate and I probably would get details wrong in the re-telling.  Therefore, the best approach to the film's subject is to explain its premise.  A somewhat hapless and mild-mannered philosophy and psychology professor at the University of New Orleans moonlights as a tech assistant for the local police -- he's good with wires and recording devices.  After lecturing on Nietzsche's dictum that one should "live dangerously... in cities built on the edges of volcanoes", the professor is asked to wear a wire into a meeting with a suspect who wants to hire a killer to murder someone.  It turns out that the professor, Gary, is a natural at imitating the diction and demeanor of a contract killer in a made-for-TV movie, thereby entrapping the poor idiot who wants to hire him.  Gary, the mild-mannered professor, stands in for Jaspar, a conspicuously corrupt undercover cop who sleeps with suspects and beats up teenagers (an assault recorded on video and shown on You-Tube).  When Jaspar is suspected (with pay), Gary picks up his workload and amasses an impressive record of convictions.  The funniest and most entertaining part of the movie involves thumbnail sketches of the bad guys whom Gary entraps adopting increasingly outrageous personae -- a Russian gangster, a pale, ethereal sexually ambiguous sadist, and other amusing caricatures of TV and movie caricatures, completely implausible but "close enough for government work" (as they say) to trap the fools who are trying to hire him.  In the course of this work, Gary encounters a winsome young woman who wants to hire a contract killer to murder her abusive husband.  Gary falls for the girl and talks her out of the criminal scheme, encouraging her to take her envelope of cash and buy a divorce.  The girl, named Madison, is seductive and, of course, the feckless University professor pretending to be the hardest of hard men falls for her.  In his guise as Ron, a tough-guy killer, he embarks on a love affair with the young woman involving steamy encounters in her steamy little New Orleans bungalow.  (They vow to have sex without any complications of entanglement or love, somewhat like the transaction between Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris.) Of course, the arrangement for casual, no-strings-attached sex fails.  Jaspar is back, sniffing around to regain his job (we see him literally creeping around on the ground sniffing at Gary/Ron.)  It turns out that Madison has not divorced her husband.  He reappears and threatens her.  Gary, as the tough guy Ron< pulls a gun.  And, later, Madison who is not as sweet or innocent as she appears -- the movie is cunning enough that we almost forget that she is first introduced trying to hire a killer -- ends up following the fake hit man's instructions as to efficient murder:  she guns down her husband.  From this point, the plot involves some cynical and surprising developments that I won't spoil.  

Linklater uses a classic Hollywood style intended to be totally invisible -- as in Howard Hawks' films, you never have any sense of camera angle or composition or pretense in recording the action.  The editing is invisible.  Narrative and thematic points are made efficiently and without any underlining or emphasis --Linklater trusts his audience to understand the action and its meanings without an ostentatious intervention.  The movie contains a horrific murder scene that seems vaguely comical when its underway.  It's only upon reflection that the viewer grasps the sheer nihilistic horror of what we have watched.  Linklater is a philosophical filmmaker but he introduces ideas into the picture in a way that is almost comically overt  -- the professor simply lectures to us and his students -- but also very understated.  The movie's ending is quietly disturbing, although again, filmed in such a way as to seem happy and, even, romantically satisfying.  This picture is much better than it seems, an observation that contradicts what I wrote at the beginning of the note.  You have to write down your feelings about the plot and its characters to get a full sense of how exceedingly ingenious and transgressive The Hit Man is.  And this raises a very interesting problem:  if a movie that you are watching seems merely modest, unpretentious, a genre piece mingling romantic comedy and film noir, that is, if you understand the film's very interesting ideas and critique only a day later, when recording your thoughts on the film, is the movie, in fact, successful. When you're watching the picture, it seems to be, more or less, trivial.  But, on reflection, the film presents an argument for political assassination, subverts the idea of justice and, even, anything like a stable predictable personality and, ultimately, proves that crime does pay -- that is, the film is intrinsically Nietzschean but Nietzsche disguised as romantic comedy.