Hit Man

HIT MAN   **

Richard Linklater

2024

IDEA:  A college professor who moonlights for the police as a fake hitman falls in love with a woman who solicits his services to off her husband.

BLURB:  In its first five minutes, Hit Man erects a number of red flags that bode inauspiciously for the remaining 110: a didactic introduction of theme via a college lecture; an abundance of first-person narration; that narrator, a psychology professor, having a pair of cats named Ego and Id (would this be clever to a middle-schooler, maybe?). Unfortunately, as the film goes on, these are revealed not as bugs in Linklater and Powell’s script but features. Hit Man proceeds to double-down on its gauche tendencies, from an explication of theme that’s so on-the-nose it’s basically the nose itself to characterizations, from minor roles to the leads, that seldom ever feel convincing, whether in the context of real life or the archetypal movie-movie land Linklater is reaching for. The film does not lack for ideas - it’s clearly thinking a lot about ontology, morality, and the law - but it seems bafflingly unsure of what to do with them cinematically. Like its protean protagonist, Hit Man shifts between genres and registers, from noir to erotic drama to screwball comedy, but its interpretation of each is not only tepid, but anonymized through flat televisual lighting and camerawork and listless editing. It’s ironic that a film so explicitly about identity doesn’t really have one of its own, and that its notions of life’s caprices and the contingency of the self are filtered through such static, predictable narrative form. There’s a nifty sort of Lubitschian subversiveness to Hit Man’s final vision of conjugal social integration by way of criminality, but it arrives too late in a film that mostly lurches on its way there.